Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
A House for Mr. Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul
Prologue
Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port
of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine
weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised
him to take a complete rest the Trinidad Sentinel had no choice. It gave Mr. Biswas three months’
notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of
the paper.
Mr. Biswas was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no
money. On the house in Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three
thousand dollars. The interest on this, at eight per cent, came to twenty dollars a month; the ground
rent was ten dollars. Two children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr. Biswas
might have depended, were both abroad on scholarships.
It gave Mr. Biswas some satisfaction that in the circumstances Shama did not run straight off
to her mother to beg for help. Ten years before that would have been her first thought. Now she
tried to comfort Mr. Biswas, and devised plans on her own.
“Potatoes,” she said. “We can start selling potatoes. The price around here is eight cents a
pound. If we buy at five and sell at seven–”
“Trust the Tulsi bad blood,” Mr. Biswas said. “I know that the pack of you Tulsis are
financial geniuses. But have a good look around and count the number of people selling potatoes.
Better to sell the old car.”
“No. Not the car. Don’t worry. We’ll manage.”
“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said irritably. “We’ll manage.”
No more was heard of the potatoes, and Mr. Biswas never threatened again to sell the car. He
didn’t now care to do anything against his wife’s wishes. He had grown to accept her judgement
and to respect her optimism. He trusted her. Since they had moved to the house Shama had learned
a new loyalty, to him and to their children; away from her mother and sisters, she was able to
express this without shame, and to Mr. Biswas this was a triumph almost as big as the acquiring of
his own house.
He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably mortgaged. And
during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in
his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he
wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to
wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to
retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs. Tulsi’s houses,
crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their children. As a boy he had moved from one
house of strangers to another; and since his marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses
of the Tulsis, at Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the
clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on
his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this
seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous.
The house could be seen from two or three streets away and was known all over St. James. It
was like a huge and squat sentry-box: tall, square, two-storeyed, with a pyramidal roof of
corrugated iron. It had been designed and built by a solicitor’s clerk who built houses in his spare
time. The solicitor’s clerk had many contacts. He bought land which the City Council had
announced was not for sale; he persuaded estate owners to split whole lots into half-lots; he bought
lots of barely reclaimed swamp land near Mucurapo and got permission to build on them. On whole
lots or three-quarter-lots he built one-storey houses, twenty feet by twenty-six, which could pass
unnoticed; on half-lots he built two-storey houses, twenty feet by thirteen, which were distinctive.
All his houses were assembled mainly from frames from the dismantled American Army camps at
Docksite, Pompeii Savannah and Fort Read. The frames did not always match, but they enabled the
solicitor’s clerk to pursue his hobby with little professional help.
On the ground floor of Mr. Biswas’s two-storey house the solicitor’s clerk had put a tiny
kitchen in one corner; the remaining L-shaped space, unbroken, served as drawingroom and
diningroom. Between the kitchen and the diningroom there was a doorway but no door. Upstairs,
just above the kitchen, the clerk had constructed a concrete room which contained a toilet bowl, a
wash-basin and a shower; because of the shower this room was perpetually wet. The remaining
L-shaped space was broken up into a bedroom, a verandah, a bedroom. Because the house faced
west and had no protection from the sun, in the afternoon only two rooms were comfortably
habitable: the kitchen downstairs and the wet bathroom-and-lavatory upstairs.
In his original design the solicitor’s clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to
link both floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought. Doorways had
been punched in the eastern wall and a rough wooden staircase–heavy planks on an uneven frame
with one warped unpainted banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron–hung
precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed brickwork of the
front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and windows.
For this house Mr. Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars.
Mr. Biswas had built two houses of his own and spent much time looking at houses. Yet he
was inexperienced. The houses he had built had been crude wooden things in the country, not much
better than huts. And during his search for a house he had always assumed new and modern
concrete houses, bright with paint, to be beyond him; and he had looked at few. So when he was
faced with one which was accessible, with a solid, respectable, modern front, he was immediately
dazzled. He had never visited the house when the afternoon sun was on it. He had first gone one
afternoon when it was raining, and the next time, when he had taken the children, it was evening.
Of course there were houses to be bought for two thousand and three thousand dollars, on a
whole lot, in rising parts of the city. But these houses were old and decaying, with no fences and no
conveniences of any sort. Often on one lot there was a conglomeration of two or three miserable
houses, with every room of every house let to a separate family who couldn’t legally be got out.
What a change from those backyards, overrun with chickens and children, to the drawing-room of
the solicitor’s clerk who, coatless, tieless and in slippers, looked relaxed and comfortable in his
morris chair, while the heavy red curtains, reflecting on the polished floor, made the scene as cosy
and rich as something in an advertisement! What a change from the Tulsi house!
The solicitor’s clerk lived in every house he built. While he lived in the house in Sikkim
Street he was building another a discreet distance away, at Morvant. He had never married, and
lived with his widowed mother, a gracious woman who gave Mr. Biswas tea and cakes which she
had baked herself. Between mother and son there was much affection, and this touched Mr. Biswas,
whose own mother, neglected by himself, had died five years before in great poverty.
“I can’t tell you how sad it make me to leave this house,” the solicitor’s clerk said, and Mr.
Biswas noted that though the man spoke dialect he was obviously educated and used dialect and an
exaggerated accent only to express frankness and cordiality. “Really for my mother’s sake, man.
That is the onliest reason why I have to move. The old queen can’t manage the steps.” He nodded
towards the back of the house, where the staircase was masked by heavy red curtains. “Heart, you
see. Could pass away any day.”
Shama had disapproved from the first and never gone to see the house. When Mr. Biswas
asked her, “Well, what you think?” Shama said, “Think? Me? Since when you start thinking that I
could think anything? If I am not good enough to go and see your house, I don’t see how I could be
good enough to say what I think.”
“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said. “Swelling up. Vexed. I bet you would be saying something different
if it was your mother who was spending some of her dirty money to buy this house.”
Shama sighed.
“Eh? You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your
big, happy family. Eh?”
“I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to
think anything.”
The news that Mr. Biswas was negotiating for a house of his own had gone around Shama’s
family. Suniti, a niece of twenty-seven, married, with two children, and abandoned for long periods
by her husband, a handsome idler who looked after the railway buildings at Pokima Halt where
trains stopped twice a day, Suniti said to Shama, “I hear that you come like a big-shot, Aunt.” She
didn’t hide her amusement. “Buying house and thing.”
“Yes, child,” Shama said, in her martyr’s way.
The exchange took place on the back steps and reached the ears of Mr. Biswas, lying in pants
and vest on the Slumberking bed in the room which contained most of the possessions he had
gathered after forty-one years. He had carried on a war with Suniti ever since she was a child, but
his contempt had never been able to quell her sarcasm. “Shama,” he shouted, “tell that girl to go
back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.”
The goats were an invention of Mr. Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. “Goats!” she
said to the yard, and sucked her teeth. “Well, some people at least have goats. Which is more than I
could say for some other people.”
“Tcha!” Mr. Biswas said softly; and, refusing to be drawn into an argument with Suniti, he
turned on his side and continued to read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
The very day the house was bought they began to see flaws in it. The staircase was dangerous;
the upper floor sagged; there was no back door; most of the windows didn’t close; one door could
not open; the celotex panels under the eaves had fallen out and left gaps between which bats could
enter the attic. They discussed these things as calmly as they could and took care not to express
their disappointment openly. And it was astonishing how quickly this disappointment had faded,
how quickly they had accommodated themselves to every peculiarity and awkwardness of the
house. And once that had happened their eyes ceased to be critical, and the house became simply
their house.
When Mr. Biswas came back from the hospital for the first time, he found that the house had
been prepared for him. The small garden had been made tidy, the downstairs walls distempered.
The Prefect motorcar was in the garage, driven there weeks before from the Sentinel office by a
friend. The hospital had been a void. He had stepped from that into a welcoming world, a new,
ready-made world. He could not quite believe that he had made that world. He could not see why he
should have a place in it. And everything by which he was surrounded was examined and
rediscovered, with pleasure, surprise, disbelief. Every relationship, every possession.
The kitchen safe. That was more than twenty years old. Shortly after his marriage he had
bought it, white and new, from the carpenter at Arwacas, the netting unpainted, the wood still
odorous; then, and for some time afterwards, sawdust stuck to your hand when you passed it along
the shelves. How often he had stained and varnished it! And painted it too. Patches of the netting
were clogged, and varnish and paint had made a thick uneven skin on the woodwork. And in what
colours he had painted it! Blue and green and even black. In 1938, the week the Pope died and the
Sentinel came out with a black border, he had come across a large tin of yellow paint and painted
everything yellow, even the typewriter. That had been acquired when, at the age of thirty-three, he
had decided to become rich by writing for American and English magazines; a brief, happy, hopeful
period. The typewriter had remained idle and yellow, and its colour had long since ceased to startle.
And why, except that it had moved everywhere with them and they regarded it as one of their
possessions, had they kept the hatrack, its glass now leprous, most of its hooks broken, its
woodwork ugly with painting-over? The bookcase had been made at Shorthills by an out-of-work
blacksmith who had been employed by the Tulsis as a cabinet-maker; he revealed his skill in his
original craft in every bit of wood he had fashioned, every joint he had made, every ornament he
had attempted. And the diningtable: bought cheaply from a Deserving Destitute who had got some
money from the Sentinel’s Deserving Destitutes Fund and wished to show his gratitude to Mr.
Biswas. And the Slumberking bed, where he could no longer sleep because it was upstairs and he
had been forbidden to climb steps. And the glass cabinet: bought to please Shama, still dainty, and
still practically empty. And the morris suite: the last acquisition, it had belonged to the solicitor’s
clerk and had been left by him as a gift. And in the garage outside, the Prefect.
But bigger than them all was the house, his house.
How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis,
amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the
children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to
one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and
unaccommodated.
Part One
1. Pastoral
Shortly before he was born there had been another quarrel between Mr. Biswas’s mother Bipti
and his father Raghu, and Bipti had taken her three children and walked all the way in the hot sun to
the village where her mother Bissoondaye lived. There Bipti had cried and told the old story of
Raghu’s miserliness: how he kept a check on every cent he gave her, counted every biscuit in the
tin, and how he would walk ten miles rather than pay a cart a penny.
Bipti’s father, futile with asthma, propped himself up on his string bed and said, as he always
did on unhappy occasions, “Fate. There is nothing we can do about it.”
No one paid him any attention. Fate had brought him from India to the sugar-estate, aged him
quickly and left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in the swamplands; yet he spoke of Fate often
and affectionately, as though, merely by surviving, he had been particularly favoured.
While the old man talked on, Bissoondaye sent for the midwife, made a meal for Bipti’s
children and prepared beds for them. When the midwife came the children were asleep. Some time
later they were awakened by the screams of Mr. Biswas and the shrieks of the midwife.
“What is it?” the old man asked. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy, boy,” the midwife cried. “But what sort of boy? Six-fingered, and born in the wrong
way.”
The old man groaned and Bissoondaye said, “I knew it. There is no luck for me.”
At once, though it was night and the way was lonely, she left the hut and walked to the next
village, where there was a hedge of cactus. She brought back leaves of cactus, cut them into strips
and hung a strip over every door, every window, every aperture through which an evil spirit might
enter the hut.
But the midwife said, “Whatever you do, this boy will eat up his own mother and father.”
The next morning, when in the bright light it seemed that all evil spirits had surely left the
earth, the pundit came, a small, thin man with a sharp satirical face and a dismissing manner.
Bissoondaye seated him on the string bed, from which the old man had been turned out, and told
him what had happened.
“Hm. Born in the wrong way. At midnight, you said. “
Bissoondaye had no means of telling the time, but both she and the midwife had assumed that
it was midnight, the inauspicious hour.
Abruptly, as Bissoondaye sat before him with bowed and covered head, the pundit brightened,
“Oh, well. It doesn’t matter. There are always ways and means of getting over these unhappy
things.” He undid his red bundle and took out his astrological almanac, a sheaf of loose thick leaves,
long and narrow, between boards. The leaves were brown with age and their musty smell was
mixed with that of the red and ochre sandalwood paste that had been spattered on them. The pundit
lifted a leaf, read a little, wet his forefinger on his tongue and lifted another leaf.
At last he said, “First of all, the features of this unfortunate boy. He will have good teeth but
they will be rather wide, and there will be spaces between them. I suppose you know what that
means. The boy will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well. It is hard to be sure about
those gaps between the teeth. They might mean only one of those things or they might mean all
three.”
“What about the six fingers, pundit?”
“That’s a shocking sign, of course. The only thing I can advise is to keep him away from trees
and water. Particularly water.”
“Never bath him?”
“I don’t mean exactly that.” He raised his right hand, bunched the fingers and, with his head
on one side, said slowly, “One has to interpret what the book says.” He tapped the wobbly almanac
with his left hand. “And when the book says water, I think it means water in its natural form.”
“Natural form.”
“Natural form,” the pundit repeated, but uncertainly. “I mean,” he said quickly, and with some
annoyance, “keep him away from rivers and ponds. And of course the sea. And another thing,” He
added with satisfaction. “He will have an unlucky sneeze.” He began to pack the long leaves of his
almanac. “Much of the evil this boy will undoubtedly bring will be mitigated if his father is
forbidden to see him for twenty-one days.”
“That will be easy,” Bissoondaye said, speaking with emotion for the first time.
“On the twenty-first day the father must see the boy. But not in the flesh.”
“In a mirror, pundit?”
“I would consider that ill-advised. Use a brass plate. Scour it well.”
“Of course.”
“You must fill this brass plate with coconut oil–which, by the way, you must make yourself
from coconuts you have collected with your own hands–and in the reflection on this oil the father
must see his son’s face.” He tied the almanac together and rolled it in the red cotton wrapper which
was also spattered with sandalwood paste. “I believe that is all.”
“We forgot one thing, punditji. The name.”
“I can’t help you completely there. But it seems to me that a perfectly safe prefix would be
Mo . It is up to you to think of something to add to that.”
“Oh, punditji, you must help me. I can only think of hun .”
The pundit was surprised and genuinely pleased. “But that is excellent. Excellent. Mohun . I
couldn’t have chosen better myself. For Mohun, as you know, means the beloved, and was the name
given by the milkmaids to Lord Krishna.” His eyes softened at the thought of the legend and for a
moment he appeared to forget Bissoondaye and Mr. Biswas.
From the knot at the end of her veil Bissoondaye took out a florin and offered it to the pundit,
mumbling her regret that she could not give more. The pundit said that she had done her best and
was not to worry. In fact he was pleased; he had expected less.
Mr. Biswas lost his sixth finger before he was nine days old. It simply came off one night and
Bipti had an unpleasant turn when, shaking out the sheets one morning, she saw this tiny finger
tumble to the ground. Bissoondaye thought this an excellent sign and buried the finger behind the
cowpen at the back of the house, not far from where she had buried Mr. Biswas’s navel-string.
In the days that followed Mr. Biswas was treated with attention and respect. His brothers and
sisters were slapped if they disturbed his sleep, and the flexibility of his limbs was regarded as a
matter of importance. Morning and evening he was massaged with coconut oil. All his joints were
exercised; his arms and legs were folded diagonally across his red shining body; the big toe of his
right foot was made to touch his left shoulder, the big toe of his left foot was made to touch his right
shoulder, and both toes were made to touch his nose; finally, all his limbs were bunched together
over his belly and then, with a clap and a laugh, released.
Mr. Biswas responded well to these exercises, and Bissoondaye became so confident that she
decided to have a celebration on the ninth day. She invited people from the village and fed them.
The pundit came and was unexpectedly gracious, though his manner suggested that but for his
intervention there would have been no celebration at all. Jhagru, the barber, brought his drum, and
Selochan did the Shiva dance in the cowpen, his body smeared all over with ash.
There was an unpleasant moment when Raghu, Mr. Biswas’s father, appeared. He had
walked; his dhoti and jacket were sweated and dusty. “Well, this is very nice,” he said.
“Celebrating. And where is the father?”
“Leave this house at once,” Bissoondaye said, coming out of the kitchen at the side. “Father!
What sort of father do you call yourself, when you drive your wife away every time she gets
heavy-footed?”
“That is none of your business,” Raghu said. “Where is my son?”
“Go ahead. God has paid you back for your boasting and your meanness. Go and see your
son. He will eat you up. Six-fingered, born in the wrong way. Go in and see him. He has an unlucky
sneeze as well.”
Raghu halted. “Unlucky sneeze?”
“I have warned you. You can only see him on the twenty-first day. If you do anything stupid
now the responsibility will be yours.”
From his string bed the old man muttered abuse at Raghu. “Shameless, wicked. When I see
the behaviour of this man I begin to feel that the Black Age has come.”
The subsequent quarrel and threats cleared the air. Raghu confessed he had been in the wrong
and had already suffered much for it. Bipti said she was willing to go back to him. And he agreed to
come again on the twenty-first day.
To prepare for that day Bissoondaye began collecting dry coconuts. She husked them, grated
the kernels and set about extracting the oil the pundit had prescribed. It was a long job of boiling
and skimming and boiling again, and it was surprising how many coconuts it took to make a little
oil. But the oil was ready in time, and Raghu came, neatly dressed, his hair plastered flat and
shining, his moustache trimmed, and he was very correct as he took off his hat and went into the
dark inner room of the hut which smelled warmly of oil and old thatch. He held his hat on the right
side of his face and looked down into the oil in the brass plate. Mr. Biswas, hidden from his father
by the hat, and well wrapped from head to foot, was held face downwards over the oil. He didn’t
like it; he furrowed his forehead, shut his eyes tight and bawled. The oil rippled, clear amber, broke
up the reflection of Mr. Biswas’s face, already distorted with rage, and the viewing was over.
A few days later Bipti and her children returned home. And there Mr. Biswas’s importance
steadily diminished. The time came when even the daily massage ceased.
But he still carried weight. They never forgot that he was an unlucky child and that his sneeze
was particularly unlucky. Mr. Biswas caught cold easily and in the rainy season threatened his
family with destitution. If, before Raghu left for the sugar-estate, Mr. Biswas sneezed, Raghu
remained at home, worked on his vegetable garden in the morning and spent the afternoon making
walking-sticks and sabots, or carving designs on the hafts of cutlasses and the heads of
walking-sticks. His favourite design was a pair of Wellingtons; he had never owned Wellingtons
but had seen them on the overseer. Whatever he did, Raghu never left the house. Even so, minor
mishaps often followed Mr. Biswas’s sneeze: threepence lost in the shopping, the breaking of a
bottle, the upsetting of a dish. Once Mr. Biswas sneezed on three mornings in succession.
“This boy will eat up his family in truth,” Raghu said.
One morning, just after Raghu had crossed the gutter that ran between the road and his yard,
he suddenly stopped. Mr. Biswas had sneezed. Bipti ran out and said, “It doesn’t matter. He sneezed
when you were already on the road.”
“But I heard him. Distinctly.”
Bipti persuaded him to go to work. About an hour or two later, while she was cleaning the
rice for the midday meal, she heard shouts from the road and went out to find Raghu lying in an
ox-cart, his right leg swathed in bloody bandages. He was groaning, not from pain, but from anger.
The man who had brought him refused to help him into the yard: Mr. Biswas’s sneeze was too well
known. Raghu had to limp in leaning on Bipti’s shoulder.
“This boy will make us all paupers,” Raghu said.
He spoke from a deep fear. Though he saved and made himself and his family go without
many things, he never ceased to feel that destitution was very nearly upon him. The more he
hoarded, the more he felt he had to waste and to lose, and the more careful he became.
Every Saturday he lined up with the other labourers outside the estate office to collect his pay.
The overseer sat at a little table, on which his khaki cork hat rested, wasteful of space, but a symbol
of wealth. On his left sat the Indian clerk, important, stern, precise, with small neat hands that wrote
small neat figures in black ink and red ink in the tall ledger. As the clerk entered figures and called
out names and amounts in his high, precise voice, the overseer selected coins from the columns of
silver and the heaps of copper in front of him, and with greater deliberation extracted notes from the
blue one-dollar stacks, the smaller red two-dollar stack and the very shallow green five-dollar stack.
Few labourers earned five dollars a week; the notes were there to pay those who were collecting
their wives’ or husbands’ wages as well as their own. Around the overseer’s cork hat, and seeming
to guard it, there were stiffblue paper bags, neatly serrated at the top, printed with large figures, and
standing upright from the weight of coin inside them. Clean round perforations gave glimpses of the
coin and, Raghu had been told, allowed it to breathe.
These bags fascinated Raghu. He had managed to get a few and after many months and a little
cheating–turning a shilling into twelve pennies, for example–he had filled them. Thereafter he had
never been able to stop. No one, not even Bipti, knew where he hid these bags; but the word had got
around that he buried his money and was possibly the richest man in the village. Such talk alarmed
Raghu and, to counter it, he increased his austerities.
Mr. Biswas grew. The limbs that had been massaged and oiled twice a day now remained
dusty and muddy and unwashed for days. The malnutrition that had given him the sixth finger of
misfortune pursued him now with eczema and sores that swelled and burst and scabbed and burst
again, until they stank; his ankles and knees and wrists and elbows were in particular afflicted, and
the sores left marks like vaccination scars. Malnutrition gave him the shallowest of chests, the
thinnest of limbs; it stunted his growth and gave him a soft rising belly. And yet, perceptibly, he
grew. He was never aware of being hungry. It never bothered him that he didn’t go to school. Life
was unpleasant only because the pundit had forbidden him to go near ponds and rivers. Raghu was
an excellent swimmer and Bipti wished him to train Mr. Biswas’s brothers. So every Sunday
morning Raghu took Pratap and Prasad to swim in a stream not far off, and Mr. Biswas stayed at
home, to be bathed by Bipti and have all his sores ripped open by her strong rubbing with the blue
soap. But in an hour or two the redness and rawness of the sores had faded, scabs were beginning to
form, and Mr. Biswas was happy again. He played at house with his sister Dehuti. They mixed
yellow earth with water and made mud fireplaces; they cooked a few grains of rice in empty
condensed milk tins; and, using the tops of tins as baking-stones, they made rotis.
In these amusements Prasad and Pratap took no part. Nine and eleven respectively, they were
past such frivolities, and had already begun to work, joyfully cooperating with the estates in
breaking the law about the employment of children. They had developed adult mannerisms. They
spoke with blades of grass between their teeth; they drank noisily and sighed, passing the back of
their hands across their mouths; they ate enormous quantities of rice, patted their bellies and
belched; and every Saturday they stood up in line to draw their pay. Their job was to look after the
buffaloes that drew the cane-carts. The buffaloes’ pleasance was a muddy, cloyingly sweet pool not
far from the factory; here, with a dozen other thin-limbed boys, noisy, happy, over-energetic and
with a full sense of their importance, Pratap and Prasad moved all day in the mud among the
buffaloes. When they came home their legs were caked with the buffalo mud which, on drying, had
turned white, so that they looked like the trees in fire-stations and police-stations which are washed
with white lime up to the middle of their trunks.
Much as he wanted to, it was unlikely that Mr. Biswas would have joined his brothers at the
buffalo pond when he was of age. There was the pundit’s ruling against water; and though it could
be argued that mud was not water, and though an accident there might have removed the source of
Raghu’s anxiety, neither Raghu nor Bipti would have done anything against the pundit’s advice. In
another two or three years, when he could be trusted with a sickle, Mr. Biswas would be made to
join the boys and girls of the grass-gang. Between them and the buffalo boys there were constant
disputes, and there was no doubt who were superior. The buffalo boys, with their leggings of white
mud, tickling the buffaloes and beating them with sticks, shouting at them and controlling them,
exercised power. Whereas the children of the grass-gang, walking briskly along the road single file,
their heads practically hidden by tall, wide bundles of wet grass, hardly able to see, and, because of
the weight on their heads and the grass over their faces, unable to make more than slurred, brief
replies to taunts, were easy objects of ridicule.
And it was to be the grass-gang for Mr. Biswas. Later he would move to the cane fields, to
weed and clean and plant and reap; he would be paid by the task and his tasks would be measured
out by a driver with a long bamboo rod. And there he would remain. He would never become a
driver or a weigher because he wouldn’t be able to read. Perhaps, after many years, he might save
enough to rent or buy a few acres where he would plant his own canes, which he would sell to the
estate at a price fixed by them. But he would achieve this only if he had the strength and optimism
of his brother Pratap. For that was what Pratap did. And Pratap, illiterate all his days, was to
become richer than Mr. Biswas; he was to have a house of his own, a large, strong, well-built house,
years before Mr. Biswas.
But Mr. Biswas never went to work on the estates. Events which were to occur presently led
him away from that. They did not lead him to riches, but made it possible for him to console
himself in later life with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, while he rested on the Slumberking
bed in the one room which contained most of his possessions.
Dhari, the next-door neighbour, bought a cow in calf, and when the calf was born, Dhari,
whose wife went out to work and who had no children of his own, offered Mr. Biswas the job of
taking water to the calf during the day, at a penny a week. Raghu and Bipti were pleased.
Mr. Biswas loved the calf, for its big head that looked so insecurely attached to its slender
body, for its knobbly shaky legs, its big sad eyes and pink stupid nose. He liked to watch the calf
tugging fiercely and sloppily at its mother’s udders, its thin legs splayed out, its head almost hidden
under its mother’s belly. And he did more than take water to the calf. He took it for walks across
damp fields of razor grass and along the rutted lanes between the cane fields, anxious to feed it with
grass of many sorts and unable to understand why the calf resented being led from one place to
another.
It was on one of these walks that Mr. Biswas discovered the stream. It could not be here that
Raghu brought Pratap and Prasad to swim: it was too shallow. But it was certainly here that Bipti
and Dehuti came on Sunday afternoons to do the washing and returned with their fingers white and
pinched. Between clumps of bamboo the stream ran over smooth stones of many sizes and colours,
the cool sound of water blending with the rustle of the sharp leaves, the creaks of the tall bamboos
when they swayed and their groans when they rubbed against one another.
Mr. Biswas stood in the stream and looked down. The swift movement of the water and the
noise made him forget its shallowness, the stones felt slippery, and in a panic he scrambled up to the
bank and looked at the water, now harmless again, while the calf stood idle and unhappy beside
him, not caring for bamboo leaves.
He continued to go to the forbidden stream. Its delights seemed endless. In a small eddy, dark
in the shadow of the bank, he came upon a school of small black fish matching their background so
well that they might easily have been mistaken for weeds. He lay down on the bamboo leaves and
stretched out a hand slowly, but as soon as his fingers touched the water, the fish, with a wriggle
and flick, were away. After that, when he saw the fish, he did not try to catch them. He would watch
them and then drop things on the water. A dry bamboo leaf might cause a slight tremor among the
fish; a bamboo twig might frighten them more; but if he remained still after that and dropped
nothing the fish would become calm again. Then he would spit. Though he couldn’t spit as well as
his brother Pratap who, with casual violence, could make his spit resound wherever it fell, it pleased
Mr. Biswas to see his spit circling slowly above the black fish before being carried away into the
main stream. Fishing he sometimes tried, with a thin bamboo rod, a length of string, a bent pin and
no bait. The fish didn’t bite; but if he wiggled the string violently they became frightened. When he
had gazed at the fish long enough he dropped a stick into the water; it was good then to see the
whole school instantly streaking away.
Then one day Mr. Biswas lost the calf. He had forgotten it, watching the fish. And when, after
dropping the stick and scattering the fish, he remembered the calf, it had gone. He hunted for it
along the banks and in the adjoining fields. He went back to the field where Dhari had left the calf
that morning. The iron piquet, its head squashed and shiny from repeated poundings, was there, but
no rope was attached to it, no calf. He spent a long time searching, in fields full of tall weeds with
fluffy heads, in the gutters, like neat red gashes, between the fields, and among the sugarcane. He
called for it, mooing softly so as not to attract the attention of people.
Abruptly, he decided that the calf was lost for good; that the calf was anyway able to look
after itself and would somehow make its way back to its mother in Dhari’s yard. In the meantime
the best thing for him to do would be to hide until the calf was found, or perhaps forgotten. It was
getting late and he decided that the best place for him to hide would be at home.
The afternoon was almost over. In the west the sky was gold and smoke. Most of the villagers
were back from work, and Mr. Biswas had to make his way home with caution, keeping close to
hedges and sometimes hiding in gutters. Unseen, he came right up to the back boundary of their lot.
On a stand between the hut and the cowpen he saw Bipti washing enamel, brass and tin dishes with
ashes and water. He hid behind the hibiscus hedge. Pratap and Prasad came, blades of grass
between their teeth, their close-fitting felt hats damp with sweat, their faces scorched by the sun and
stained with sweat, their legs cased in white mud. Pratap threw a length of white cotton around his
dirty trousers and undressed with expert adult modesty before using the calabash to throw water
over himself from the big black oil barrel. Prasad stood on a board and began scraping the white
mud off his legs.
Bipti said, “You boys will have to go and get some wood before it gets dark.”
Prasad lost his temper; and, as though by scraping off the white mud he had lost the
composure of adulthood, he flung his hat to the ground and cried like a child, “Why do you ask me
now ? Why do you ask me every day? I am not going.”
Raghu came to the back, an unfinished walking-stick in one hand and in the other a smoking
wire with which he had been burning patterns into the stick. “Listen, boy,” Raghu said. “Don’t feel
that because you are earning money you are a man. Do what your mother asks. And go quickly,
before I use this stick on you, even though it is unfinished.” He smiled at his joke.
Mr. Biswas became uneasy.
Prasad, still raging, picked up his hat, and he and Pratap went away to the front of the house.
Bipti took her dishes to the kitchen in the front verandah, where Dehuti would be helping with
the evening meal. Raghu went back to his bonfire at the front. Mr. Biswas slipped through the
hibiscus fence, crossed the narrow, shallow gutter, grey-black and squelchy with the ashy water
from the washing-up stand and the muddy water from Pratap’s bath, and made his way to the small
back verandah where there was a table, the only piece of carpenter-built furniture in the hut. From
the verandah he went into his father’s room, passed under the valance of the bed–planks resting on
upright logs sunk into the earth floor–and prepared to wait.
It was a long wait but he endured it without discomfort. Below the bed the smell of old cloth,
dust and old thatch combined into one overpoweringly musty smell. Idly, to pass the time, he tried
to disentangle one smell from the other, while his ears picked up the sounds in and around the hut.
They were remote and dramatic. He heard the boys return and throw down the dry wood they had
brought. Prasad still raged, Raghu warned, Bipti coaxed. Then all at once Mr. Biswas became alert.
“Ey, Raghu?” He recognized Dhari’s voice. “Where is that youngest son of yours?”
“Mohun? Bipti, where is Mohun?”
“With Dhari’s calf, I suppose.”
“Well, he isn’t,” Dhari said.
him.”
“Prasad!” Bipti called. “Pratap! Dehuti! Have you seen Mohun?”
“No, mai.”
“No, mai.”
“No, mai.”
“No, mai. No, mai. No, mai,” Raghu said. “What the hell do you think it is? Go and look for
“Oh God !” Prasad cried.
“And you too, Dhari. It was your idea, getting Mohun to look after the calf. I hold you
responsible.”
“The magistrate will have something else to say,” Dhari said. “A calf is a calf, and for one
who is not as rich as yourself–”
“I am sure nothing has happened,” Bipti said, “Mohun knows he mustn’t go near water.”
Mr. Biswas was startled by a sound of wailing. It came from Dhari. “Water, water. Oh, the
unlucky boy. Not content with eating up his mother and father, he is eating me up as well. Water!
Oh, Mohun’s mother, what you have said?”
“Water?” Raghu sounded puzzled.
“The pond, the pond,” Dhari wailed, and Mr. Biswas heard him shouting to the neighbours,
“Raghu’s son has drowned my calf in the pond. A nice calf. My first calf. My only calf
Quickly a chattering crowd gathered. Many of them had been to the pond that afternoon; quite
a number had seen a calf wandering about, and one or two had even seen a boy.
“Nonsense!” Raghu said. “You are a pack of liars. The boy doesn’t go near water.” He paused
and added, “The pundit especially forbade him to go near water in its natural form.”
Lakhan the carter said, “But this is a fine man. He doesn’t seem to care whether his son is
drowned or not.”
“How do you know what he thinks?” Bipti said.
“Leave him, leave him,” Raghu said, in an injured, forgiving tone. “Mohun is my son. And if
I don’t care whether he is drowned or not, that is my business.”
“What about my calf?” Dhari said.
“I don’t care about your calf. Pratap! Prasad! Dehuti! Have you seen your brother?”
“No, father.”
“No, father.”
“No, father.”
“I will go and dive for him,” Lakhan said.
“You are very anxious to show off,” Raghu said.
“Oh!” Bipti cried. “Stop this bickering-ickering and let us go to look for the boy.”
“Mohun is my son,” Raghu said. “And if anybody is going to dive for him, it will be me. And
I pray to God, Dhari, that when I get to the bottom of that pond I find your wretched calf.”
“Witnesses!” Dhari said. “You are all my witnesses. Those words will have to be repeated in
court.”
“To the pond! To the pond!” the villagers said, and the news was shouted to those just
arriving: “Raghu is going to dive for his son in the pond.”
Mr. Biswas, under his father’s bed, had listened at first with pleasure, then with apprehension.
Raghu came into the room, breathing heavily and swearing at the village. Mr. Biswas heard him
undress and shout for Bipti to come and rub him down with coconut oil. She came and rubbed him
down and they both left the room. From the road chatter and the sound of footsteps rose, and slowly
faded.
Mr. Biswas came out from under the bed and was dismayed to find that the hut was dark. In
the next room someone began to cry. He went to the doorway and looked. It was Dehuti. From the
nail on the wall she had taken down his shirt and two vests and was pressing them to her face.
“Sister,” he whispered.
She heard and saw, and her sobs turned to screams.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know what to do. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said, but the words were
useless, and he went back to his father’s room. Just in time, for at that moment Sadhu, the very old
man who lived two houses away, came and asked what was wrong, his words whistling through the
gaps in his teeth.
Dehuti continued to scream. Mr. Biswas put his hands into his trouser pockets and, through
the holes in them, pressed his fingers on his thighs.
Sadhu led Dehuti away.
Outside, from an unknown direction, a frog honked, then made a sucking, bubbling noise. The
crickets were already chirping. Mr. Biswas was alone in the dark hut, and frightened.
The pond lay in swampland. Weeds grew all over its surface and from a distance it appeared
to be no more than a shallow depression. In fact it was full of abrupt depths and the villagers liked
to think that these were immeasurable. There were no trees or hills around, so that though the sun
had gone, the sky remained high and light. The villagers stood silently around the safe edge of the
pond. The frogs honked and the poor-me-one bird began to say the mournful words that gave it its
name. The mosquitoes were already active; from time to time a villager slapped his arm or lifted a
leg and slapped that.
Lakhan the carter said, “He’s been down there too long.”
Bipti frowned.
Before Lakhan could take off his shirt Raghu broke the surface, puffed out his cheeks, spat
out a long thin arc of water and took deep resounding breaths. The water rolled off his oiled skin,
but his moustache had collapsed over his upper lip and his hair fell in a fringe over his forehead.
Lakhan gave him a hand up. “I believe there is something down there,” Raghu said. “But it is very
dark.”
Far away the low trees were black against the fading sky; the orange streaks of sunset were
smudged with grey, as if by dirty thumbs.
Bipti said, “Let Lakhan dive.”
Someone else said, “Leave it till tomorrow.”
“Till tomorrow?” Raghu said. “And poison the water for everybody?”
Lakhan said, “I will go.”
Raghu, panting, shook his head. “My son. My duty.”
“And my calf,” Dhari said.
Raghu ignored him. He ran his hands through his hair, puffed out his cheeks, put his hands to
his sides and belched. In a moment he was in the water again. The pond didn’t permit stylish diving;
Raghu merely let himself down. The water broke and rippled. The gleam it got from the sky was
fading. While they waited a cool wind came down from the hills to the north; between the shaking
weeds the water shimmered like sequins.
Lakhan said, “He’s coming up now. I believe he’s got something.”
They knew what it was from Dhari’s cry. Then Bipti began to scream, and Pratap and Prasad
and all the women, while the men helped to lift the calf to the bank. One of its sides was green with
slime; its thin limbs were ringed with vinelike weeds, still fresh and thick and green. Raghu sat on
the bank, looking down between his legs at the dark water.
Lakhan said, “Let me go down now and look for the boy.”
“Yes, man,” Bipti pleaded. “Let him go.”
Raghu remained where he was, breathing deeply, his dhoti clinging to his skin. Then he was
in the water and the villagers were silent again. They waited, looking at the calf, looking at the
pond.
Lakhan said, “Something has happened.”
A woman said, “No stupid talk now, Lakhan. Raghu is a great diver.”
“I know, I know,” Lakhan said. “But he’s been diving too long.”
Then they were all still. Someone had sneezed.
They turned to see Mr. Biswas standing some distance away in the gloom, the toe of one foot
scratching the ankle of the other.
Lakhan was in the pond. Pratap and Prasad rushed to hustle Mr. Biswas away.
“That boy!” Dhari said. “He has murdered my calf and now he has eaten up his own father.”
Lakhan brought up Raghu unconscious. They rolled him on the damp grass and pumped water
out of his mouth and through his nostrils. But it was too late.
“Messages,” Bipti kept on saying. “We must send messages.” And messages were taken
everywhere by willing and excited villagers. The most important message went to Bipti’s sister
Tara at Pagotes. Tara was a person of standing. It was her fate to be childless, but it was also her
fate to have married a man who had, at one bound, freed himself from the land and acquired wealth;
already he owned a rumshop and a dry goods shop, and he had been one of the first in Trinidad to
buy a motorcar.
Tara came and at once took control. Her arms were encased from wrist to elbow with silver
bangles which she had often recommended to Bipti: “They are not very pretty, but one clout from
this arm will settle any attacker.” She also wore earrings and a nakphul , a “nose-flower”. She had a
solid gold yoke around her neck and thick silver bracelets on her ankles. In spite of all her jewellery
she was energetic and capable, and had adopted her husband’s commanding manner. She left the
mourning to Bipti and arranged everything else. She had brought her own pundit, whom she
continually harangued; she instructed Pratap how to behave during the ceremonies; and she had
even brought a photographer.
She urged Prasad, Dehuti and Mr. Biswas to behave with dignity and to keep out of the way,
and she ordered Dehuti to see that Mr. Biswas was properly dressed. As the baby of the family Mr.
Biswas was treated by the mourners with honour and sympathy, though this was touched with a
little dread. Embarrassed by their attentions, he moved about the hut and yard, thinking he could
detect a new, raw smell in the air. There was also a strange taste in his mouth; he had never eaten
meat, but now he felt he had eaten raw white flesh; nauseating saliva rose continually at the back of
his throat and he had to keep on spitting, until Tara said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you
pregnant?”
Bipti was bathed. Her hair, still wet, was neatly parted and the parting filled with red henna.
Then the henna was scooped out and the parting filled with charcoal dust. She was now a widow
forever. Tara gave a short scream and at her signal the other women began to wail. On Bipti’s wet
black hair there were still spots of henna, like drops of blood.
Cremation was forbidden and Raghu was to be buried. He lay in a coffin in the bedroom,
dressed in his finest dhoti, jacket and turban, his beads around his neck and down his jacket. The
coffin was strewed with marigolds which matched his turban. Pratap, the eldest son, did the last
rites, walking round the coffin.
“Photo now,” Tara said. “Quick. Get them all together. For the last time.”
The photographer, who had been smoking under the mango tree, went into the hut and said,
“Too dark.”
The men became interested and gave advice while the women wailed.
“Take it outside. Lean it against the mango tree.”
“Light a lamp.”
“It couldn’t be too dark.”
“What do you know? You’ve never had your photo taken. Now, what I suggest–”
The photographer, of mixed Chinese, Negro and European blood, did not understand what
was being said. In the end he and some of the men took the coffin out to the verandah and stood it
against the wall.
“Careful! Don’t let him fall out.”
“Goodness. All the marigolds have dropped out.”
“Leave them,” the photographer said in English. “Is a nice little touch. Flowers on the
ground.” He set up his tripod in the yard, just under the ragged eaves of thatch, and put his head
under the black cloth.
Tara roused Bipti from her grief, arranged Bipti’s hair and veil, and dried Bipti’s eyes.
“Five people all together,” the photographer said to Tara. “Hard to know just how to arrange
them. It look to me that it would have to be two one side and three the other side. You sure you
want all five?”
Tara was firm.
The photographer sucked his teeth, but not at Tara. “Look, look. Why nobody ain’t put
anything to chock up the coffin and prevent it from slipping?”
Tara had that attended to.
The photographer said, “All right then. Mother and biggest son on either side. Next to mother,
young boy and young girl. Next to big son, smaller son.”
There was more advice from the men.
“Make them look at the coffin.”
“At the mother.”
“At the youngest boy.”
The photographer settled the matter by telling Tara, “Tell them to look at me.”
Tara translated, and the photographer went under his cloth. Almost immediately he came out
again. “How about making the mother and the biggest boy put their hands on the edge of the
coffin?”
This was done and the photographer went back under his cloth.
“Wait!” Tara cried, running out from the hut with a fresh garland of marigolds. She hung it
around Raghu’s neck and said to the photographer in English, “All right. Draw your photo now.”
Mr. Biswas never owned a copy of the photograph and he did not see it until 1937, when it
made its appearance, framed in passepartout, on the wall of the drawingroom of Tara’s fine new
house at Pagotes, a little lost among many other photographs of funeral groups, many oval portraits
with blurred edges of more dead friends and relations, and coloured prints of the English
countryside. The photograph had faded to the lightest brown and was partially defaced by the large
heliotrope stamp of the photographer, still bright, and his smudged sprawling signature in soft black
pencil. Mr. Biswas was astonished at his own smallness. The scabs of sores and the marks of
eczema showed clearly on his knobbly knees and along his very thin arms and legs. Everyone in the
photograph had unnaturally large, staring eyes which seemed to have been outlined in black.
Tara was right when she said that the photograph was to be a record of the family all together
for the last time. For in a few days Mr. Biswas and Bipti, Pratap and Prasad and Dehuti had left
Parrot Trace and the family split up for good.
It began on the evening of the funeral.
Tara said, “Bipti, you must give me Dehuti.”
Bipti had been hoping that Tara would make the suggestion. In four or five years Dehuti
would have to be married and it was better that she should be given to Tara. She would learn
manners, acquire graces and, with a dowry from Tara, might even make a good match.
“If you are going to have someone,” Tara said, “it is better to have one of your own family.
That is what I always say. I don’t want strangers poking their noses into my kitchen and bedroom.”
Bipti agreed that it was better to have servants from one’s own family. And Pratap and Prasad
and even Mr. Biswas, who had not been asked, nodded, as though the problem of servants was one
they had given much thought.
Dehuti looked down at the floor, shook her long hair and mumbled a few words which meant
that she was far too small to be consulted, but was very pleased.
“Get her new clothes,” Tara said, fingering the georgette skirt and satin petticoat Dehuti had
worn for the funeral. “Get her some jewels.” She put a thumb and finger around Dehuti’s wrist,
lifted her face, and turned up the lobe of her ear. “Earrings. Good thing you had them pierced, Bipti.
She won’t need these sticks now.” In the holes in her lobe Dehuti wore pieces of the thin hard spine
of the blades of the coconut branch. Tara playfully pulled Dehuti’s nose. “Nakphul too. You would
like a nose-flower?”
Dehuti smiled shyly, not looking up.
“Well,” Tara said, “fashions are changing all the time these days. I am just oldfashioned, that
is all.” She stroked her gold nose-flower. “It is expensive to be oldfashioned.”
“She will satisfy you,” Bipti said. “Raghu had no money. But he trained his children well.
Training, piety–”
“Quite,” Tara said. “The time for crying is over, Bipti. How much money did Raghu leave
you?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? Are you trying to keep secrets from me? Everyone in the village knows
that Raghu had a lot of money. I am sure he has left you enough to start a nice little business.”
Pratap sucked his teeth. “He was a miser, that one. He used to hide his money.”
Tara said, “Is this the training and piety your father gave you?”
They searched. They pulled out Raghu’s box from under the bed and looked for false
bottoms; at Bipti’s suggestion they looked for any joint that might reveal a hiding-place in the
timber itself. They poked the sooty thatch and ran their hands over the rafters; they tapped the earth
floor and the bamboo-and-mud walls; they examined Raghu’s walking-sticks, taking out the
ferrules, Raghu’s only extravagance; they dismanded the bed and uprooted the logs on which it
stood. They found nothing.
Bipti said, “I don’t suppose he had any money really.”
“You are a fool,” Tara said, and it was in this mood of annoyance that she ordered Bipti to
pack Dehuti’s bundle and took Dehuti away.
Because no cooking could be done at their house, they ate at Sadhu’s. The food was unsalted
and as soon as he began to chew, Mr. Biswas felt he was eating raw flesh and the nauseous saliva
filled his mouth again. He hurried outside to empty his mouth and clean it, but the taste remained.
And Mr. Biswas screamed when, back at the hut, Bipti put him to bed and threw Raghu’s blanket
over him. The blanket was hairy and prickly; it seemed to be the source of the raw, fresh smell he
had been smelling all day. Bipti let him scream until he was tired and fell asleep in the yellow,
wavering light of the oil lamp which left the corners in darkness. She watched the wick burn lower
and lower until she heard the snores of Pratap, who snored like a big man, and the heavy breathing
of Mr. Biswas and Prasad. She slept only fitfully herself. It was quiet inside the hut, but outside the
noises were loud and continuous: mosquitoes, bats, frogs, crickets, the poor-me-one. If the cricket
missed a chirp the effect was disturbing and she awoke.
She was awakened from a light sleep by a new noise. At first she couldn’t be sure. But the
nearness of the noise and its erratic sequence disturbed her. It was a noise she heard every day but
now, isolated in the night, it was hard to place. It came again: a thud, a pause, a prolonged snapping,
then a series of gentler thuds. And it came again. Then there was another noise, of bottles breaking,
muffled, as though the bottles were full. And she knew the noises came from her garden. Someone
was stumbling among the bottles Raghu had buried neck downwards around the flower-beds.
She roused Prasad and Pratap.
Mr. Biswas, awaking to hushed talk and a room of dancing shadows, closed his eyes to keep
out the danger; at once, as on the day before, everything became dramatic and remote.
Pratap gave walking-sticks to Prasad and Bipti. Carefully he unbolted the small window, then
pushed it out with sudden vigour.
The garden was lit up by a hurricane lamp. A man was working a fork into the ground among
the bottle-borders.
“Dhari!” Bipti called.
Dhari didn’t look up or reply. He went on forking, rocking the implement in the earth, tearing
the roots that kept the earth firm.
“Dhari!”
He began to sing a wedding song.
“The cutlass!” Pratap said. “Give me the cutlass.”
“O God! No, no,” Bipti said.
“I’ll go out and beat him like a snake,” Pratap said, his voice rising out of control. “Prasad?
Mai?”
“Close the window,” Bipti said.
The singing stopped and Dhari said, “Yes, close the window and go to sleep. I am here to look
after you.”
Violently Bipti pulled the small window to, bolted it and kept her hand on the bolt.
The digging and the breaking bottles continued. Dhari sang:
In your daily tasks be resolute.
Fear no one, and trust in God.
“Dhari isn’t in this alone,” Bipti said. “Don’t provoke him.” Then, as though it not only
belittled Dhari’s behaviour but gave protection to them all, she added, “He is only after your
father’s money. Let him look.”
Mr. Biswas and Prasad were soon asleep again. Bipti and Pratap remained up until they had
heard the last of Dhari’s songs and his fork no longer dug into the earth and broke bottles. They did
not speak. Only, once, Bipti said, “Your father always warned me about the people of this village.”
Pratap and Prasad awoke when it was still dark, as they always did. They did not talk about
what had happened and Bipti insisted that they should go to the buffalo pond as usual. As soon as it
was light she went out to the garden. The flower-beds had been dug up; dew lay on the upturned
earth which partially buried uprooted plants, already limp and quailing. The vegetable patch had not
been forked, but tomato plants had been cut down, stakes broken and pumpkins slashed.
“Oh, wife of Raghu!” a man called from the road, and she saw Dhari jump across the gutter.
Absently, he picked a dew-wet leaf from the hibiscus shrub, crushed it in his palm, put it in
his mouth and came towards her, chewing.
Her anger rose. “Get out! At once! Do you call yourself a man? You are a shameless
vagabond. Shameless and cowardly.”
He walked past her, past the hut, to the garden. Chewing, he considered the damage. He was
in his working clothes, his cutlass in its black leather sheath at his waist, his enamel food-carrier in
one hand, his calabash of water hanging from his shoulder.
“Oh, wife of Raghu, what have they done?”
“I hope you found something to make you happy, Dhari.”
He shrugged, looking down at the ruined flower-beds. “They will keep on looking, maharajin
.”
“Everybody knows you lost your calf. But that was an accident. What about–”
“Yes, yes. My calf. Accident.”
“I will remember you for this, Dhari. And Raghu’s sons won’t forget you either.”
“He was a great diver.”
“Savage! Get out!”
“Willingly.” He spat out the hibiscus leaf on to a flowerbed. “I just wanted to tell you that
these wicked men will come again. Why don’t you help them, maharajin ?”
There was no one Bipti could ask for help. She distrusted the police, and Raghu had no
friends. Moreover, she didn’t know who might be in league with Dhari.
That night they gathered all Raghu’s sticks and cutlasses and waited. Mr. Biswas closed his
eyes and listened, but as the hours passed he found it hard to remain alert.
He was awakened by whispers and movement in the hut. Far away, it seemed, someone was
singing a slow, sad wedding song. Bipti and Prasad were standing. Cutlass in hand, Pratap moved in
a frenzy between the window and the door, so swiftly that the flame of the oil lamp blew this way
and that, and once, with a plopping sound, disappeared. The room sank into darkness. A moment
later the flame returned, rescuing them.
The singing drew nearer, and when it was almost upon them they heard, mingled with it,
chatter and soft laughter.
Bipti unbolted the window, pushed it open a crack, and saw the garden ablaze with lanterns.
“Three of them,” she whispered. “Lakhan, Dhari, Oumadh.”
Pratap pushed Bipti aside, flung the window wide open and screamed, “Get out! Get out! I
will kill you all.”
“Shh,” Bipti said, pulling Pratap away and trying to close the window.
“Raghu’s son,” a man said from the garden.
“Don’t sh me,” Pratap screamed, turning on Bipti. Tears came to his eyes and his voice broke
into sobs. “I will kill them all.”
“Noisy little fellow,” another man said.
“I will come back and kill you all,” Pratap shouted. “I promise you.”
Bipti took him in her arms and comforted him, like a child, and in the same gentle, unalarmed
voice said, “Prasad, close the window. And go to sleep.”
“Yes, son.” They recognized Dhari’s voice. “Go to sleep. We will be here every night now to
look after you.”
Prasad closed the window, but the noise stayed with them: song, talk, and unhurried sounds of
fork and spade. Bipti sat and stared at the door, next to which, on the ground, Pratap sat, a cutlass
beside him, its haft carved into a pair of Wellingtons. He was motionless. His tears had gone, but
his eyes were red, and the lids swollen.
In the end Bipti sold the hut and the land to Dhari, and she and Mr. Biswas moved to Pagotes.
There they lived on Tara’s bounty, though not with Tara, but with some of Tara’s husband’s
dependent relations in a back trace far from the Main Road. Pratap and Prasad were sent to a distant
relation at Felicity, in the heart of the sugar-estates; they were already broken into estate work and
were too old to learn anything else.
And so Mr. Biswas came to leave the only house to which he had some right. For the next
thirty-five years he was to be a wanderer with no place he could call his own, with no family except
that which he was to attempt to create out of the engulfing world of the Tulsis. For with his
mother’s parents dead, his father dead, his brothers on the estate at Felicity, Dehuti as a servant in
Tara’s house, and himself rapidly growing away from Bipti who, broken, became increasingly
useless and impenetrable, it seemed to him that he was really quite alone.
2. Before the Tulsis
Mr. Biswas could never afterwards say exactly where his father’s hut had stood or where
Dhari and the others had dug. He never knew whether anyone found Raghu’s money. It could not
have been much, since Raghu earned so little. But the ground did yield treasure. For this was in
South Trinidad and the land Bipti had sold so cheaply to Dhari was later found to be rich with oil.
And when Mr. Biswas was working on a feature article for the magazine section of the Sunday
Sentinel –RALEIGH’S DREAM COMES TRUE, said the headline, “But the Gold is Black. Only
the Earth is Yellow. Only the Bush Green”–when Mr. Biswas looked for the place where he had
spent his early years he saw nothing but oil derricks and grimy pumps, see-sawing, see-sawing,
endlessly, surrounded by red No Smoking notices. His grandparents’ house had also disappeared,
and when huts of mud and grass are pulled down they leave no trace. His navel-string, buried on
that inauspicious night, and his sixth finger, buried not long after, had turned to dust. The pond had
been drained and the whole swamp region was now a garden city of white wooden bungalows with
red roofs, cisterns on tall stilts, and neat gardens. The stream where he had watched the black fish
had been dammed, diverted into a reservoir, and its winding, irregular bed covered by straight
lawns, streets and drives. The world carried no witness to Mr. Biswas’s birth and early years.
As he found at Pagotes.
“How old you is, boy?” Lai, the teacher at the Canadian Mission school, asked, his small
hairy hands fussing with the cylindrical ruler on his roll-book.
Mr. Biswas shrugged and shifted from one bare foot to the other.
“How you people want to get on, eh?” Lai had been converted to Presbyterianism from a low
Hindu caste and held all unconverted Hindus in contempt. As part of this contempt he spoke to
them in broken English. “Tomorrow I want you to bring your buth certificate. You hear?”
“Buth suttificate?” Bipti echoed the English words. “I don’t have any.”
“Don’t have any, eh?” Lai said the next day. “You people don’t even know how to born, it
look like.”
But they agreed on a plausible date, Lai completed his roll-book record, and Bipti went to
consult Tara.
Tara took Bipti to a solicitor whose office was a tiny wooden shed standing lopsided on eight
unfashioned logs. The distemper on its walls had turned to dust. A sign, obviously painted by the
man himself, said that F. Z. Ghany was a solicitor, conveyancer and a commissioner of oaths. He
didn’t look like all that, sitting on a broken kitchen chair at the door of his shed, bending forward,
picking his teeth with a matchstick, his tie hanging perpendicular. Large dusty books were piled on
the dusty floor, and on the kitchen table at his back there was a sheet of green blotting-paper, also
dusty, on which there was a highly decorated metal contraption which looked like a toy version of
the merry-go-round Mr. Biswas had seen in the playground at St. Joseph on the way to Pagotes.
From this toy merry-go-round hung two rubber stamps, and directly below them there was a
purple-stained tin. F. Z. Ghany carried the rest of his office equipment in his shirt pocket; it was
stiff with pens, pencils, sheets of paper and envelopes. He needed to be able to carry his equipment
about; he opened the Pagotes office only on market day, Wednesday; he had other offices, open on
other market days, at Tunapuna, Arima, St. Joseph and Tacarigua. “Just give me three or four
dog-case or cuss-case every day,” he used to say, “and I all right, you hear.”
Seeing the group of three walking Indians file across the plank over the gutter, F. Z. Ghany
got up, spat out the matchstick and greeted them with good-humoured scorn. “Maharajin ,
maharajin , and little boy.” He made most of his money from Hindus but, as a Muslim, distrusted
them.
They climbed the two steps into his office. It became full. Ghany liked it that way; it attracted
customers. He took the chair behind the table, sat on it, and left his clients standing.
Tara began to explain about Mr. Biswas. She grew prolix, encouraged by the quizzical look
on Ghany’s heavy dissipated face.
During one of Tara’s pauses Bipti said, “Buth suttificate.”
“Oh!” Ghany said, his manner changing. “Certificate of buth.” It was a familiar problem. He
looked legal and said, “Affidavit. When did the buth take place?”
Bipti told Tara in Hindi, “I can’t really say. But Pundit Sitaram should know. He cast
Mohun’s horoscope the day after he was born.”
“I don’t know what you see in that man, Bipti. He doesn’t know anything.”
Ghany could follow their conversation. He disliked the way Indian women had of using Hindi
as a secret language in public places, and asked impatiently, “Date of buth?”
“Eighth of June,” Bipti said to Tara. “It must be that.”
“All right,” Ghany said. “Eighth of June. Who to tell you no?” Smiling, he put a hand to the
drawer of his table and pulled it this way and that before it came out. He took out a sheet of
foolscap, tore it in half, put back one half into the drawer, pushed the drawer this way and that to
close it, put the half-sheet on the dusty blotting-paper, stamped his name on it and prepared to write.
“Name of boy?”
“Mohun,” Tara said.
Mr. Biswas became shy. He passed his tongue above his upper lip and tried to make it touch
the knobby tip of his nose.
“Surname?” Ghany asked.
“Biswas,” Tara said.
“Nice Hindu name.” He asked more questions, and wrote. When he was finished, Bipti made
her mark and Tara, with great deliberation and much dancing of the pen above the paper, signed her
name. F. Z. Ghany struggled with the drawer once more, took out the other half-sheet, stamped his
name on it, wrote, and then had everybody sign again.
Mr. Biswas was now leaning forward against one of the dusty walls, his feet pushed far back.
He was spitting carefully, trying to let his spittle hang down to the floor without breaking.
F. Z. Ghany hung up his name stamp and took down the date stamp. He turned some ratchets,
banged hard on the almost dry purple pad and banged hard on the paper. Two lengths of rubber fell
apart. “Blasted thing bust,” he said, and examined it without annoyance. He explained, “You could
print the year all right, because you move that only once a year. But the dates and the months, man,
you spinning them round all the time.” He took up the length of rubber and looked at them
thoughtfully. “Here, give them to the boy. Play with them.” He wrote the date with one of his pens
and said, “All right, leave everything to me now. Expensive business, affidavits. Stamps and thing,
you know. Ten dollars in all.”
Bipti fumbled with the knot at the end of her veil and Tara paid.
“Any more children without certificate of buth?”
“Three,” Bipti said.
“Bring them,” Ghany said. “Bring all of them. Any market day. Next week? Is better to
straighten these things right away, you know.”
In this way official notice was taken of Mr. Biswas’s existence, and he entered the new world.
Ought oughts are ought,
Ought twos are ought.
The chanting of the children pleased Lai. He believed in thoroughness, discipline and what he
delighted to call stick-to-it-iveness, virtues he felt unconverted Hindus particularly lacked.
One twos are two,
Two twos are four.
“Stop!” Lai cried, waving his tamarind rod. “Biswas, ought twos are how much?”
“Two.”
“Come up here. You, Ramguli, ought twos are how much?”
“Ought.”
“Come up. That boy with a shirt that looks like one of his mother bodice. How much?”
“Four.”
“Come up.” He held the rod at both ends and bent it back and forth quickly. The sleeves of his
jacket fell down past dirty cuffs and thin wrists black with hair. The jacket was brown but had
turned saffron where it had been soaked by Lai’s sweat. For all the time he went to school, Mr.
Biswas never saw Lai wearing any other jacket.
“Ramguli, go back to your desk. All right, the two of you. All-you decide now how much
ought twos is?”
“Ought,” they whimpered together.
“Yes, ought twos are ought. You did tell me two.” He caught hold of Mr. Biswas, pulled his
trousers tight across his bottom, and began to apply the tamarind rod, saying as he beat, “Ought
twos are ought. Ought oughts are ought. One twos are two.”
Mr. Biswas, released, went crying back to his desk.
“And now you. Before we talk about anything, tell me where you get that bodice from?”
With its flaming red colour and leg-of-mutton sleeves it was obviously a bodice and had,
without comment, been recognized as such by the boys, most of whom wore garments not
originally designed for them.
“Where you get it from?”
“My sister-in-law.”
“And you thank her?”
There was no reply.
“Anyway, when you see your sister-in-law, I want you to give her a message. I want you”–
and here Lai seized the boy and started to use the tamarind rod–“I want you to tell her that ought
twos don’t make four. I want you to tell her that ought oughts are ought, ought twos are ought, one
twos are two, and two twos are four.”
Mr. Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the
King George V Hindi Reader , and he learned many English poems by heart from the Royal Reader
. At Lai’s dictation he made copious notes, which he never seriously believed, about geysers, rift
valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases,
which Lai taught him to pronounce “osis”, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more
than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by
white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and
learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lai taught he regarded
as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the
red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.
With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr. Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s
clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear,
light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, “I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a
Portuguese or something.” And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys
with disgust at their race.
It was to Mr. Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec
had given his demonstration, Mr. Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a
clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was
empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red
bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. “I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,” Alec
said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, “Buy your own. The drugstore full of them.” And
many of them did buy their own, and for a week the school’s urinals ran turquoise; and the druggist
attributed the sudden rise in sales to the success of the Dodd’s Kidney Pills Almanac which, in
addition to jokes, carried story after story of the rapid cures the pills had effected on Trinidadians,
all of whom had written the makers profusely grateful letters of the utmost articulateness, and been
photographed.
With Alec Mr. Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road
and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes River and
smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with
these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lai, who considered the
game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were
flogged and separated, but always came together again.
And it was through this association that Mr. Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When
Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr. Biswas imitated these with
pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an
astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote CANCELLED very
neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the
period was over he had done nothing else.
Lai, who had noted Mr. Biswas’s industry with approval, flew into a rage. “Ah! Sign-painter.
Come up.”
He didn’t flog Mr. Biswas. He ordered him to write I AM AN ASS on the blackboard. Mr.
Biswas outlined stylish, contemptuous letters, and the class tittered approvingly. Lai, racing about
the classroom, waving his tamarind rod for silence, brushed Mr. Biswas’s elbow and a stroke was
spoilt. Mr. Biswas turned this into an additional decoration which pleased him and impressed the
class. It was too late for Lai to flog Mr. Biswas or order him to clean the blackboard. Angrily he
pushed him away, and Mr. Biswas went back to his desk, smiling, a hero.
Mr. Biswas went to Lai’s school for nearly six years and for all that time he was friendly with
Alec. Yet he knew little about Alec’s home life. Alec never spoke about his mother or father and
Mr. Biswas knew only that he lived with his sister-in-law, the owner of the red bodice, an
unphotographed user of Dodd’s Kidney Pills, and, according to Alec, a great beater. Mr. Biswas
never saw this woman. He never went to Alec’s home and Alec never came to his. There was a tacit
agreement between them that they would keep their homes secret.
It would have pained Mr. Biswas if anyone from the school saw where he lived, in one room
of a mud hut in the back trace. He was not happy there and even after five years considered it a
temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations
with.Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers.
More and more, too, she bewailed her Fate; when she did this he felt useless and dispirited and,
instead of comforting her, went out to look for Alec. Occasionally she had ineffectual fits of temper,
quarrelled with Tara and muttered for days, threatening, whenever there was anyone to hear, that
she would leave and get a job with the road-gang, where women were needed to carry stones in
baskets on their heads. Continually, when he was with her, Mr. Biswas had to struggle against anger
and depression.
At Christmas Pratap and Prasad came from Felicity, grown men now, with moustaches; in
their best clothes, their pressed khaki trousers, unpolished brown shoes, blue shirts buttoned at the
collar, and brown hats, they too were like strangers. Their hands were as hard as their rough,
sunburnt faces, and they had little to say. When Pratap, with many self-deprecating sighs,
half-laughs and pauses which enabled him to deliver a short sentence in easy instalments without in
any way damaging its structure, when Pratap told about the donkey he had bought and the current
lengths of tasks, Mr. Biswas was not really interested. The buying of a donkey seemed to him an act
of pure comedy, and it was hard to believe that the dour Pratap was the frantic boy who had rushed
about the room in the hut threatening to kill the men in the garden.
As for Dehuti, he hardly saw her, though she lived close, at Tara’s. He seldom went there
except when Tara’s husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to
feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a
clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who
served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara’s house he was respected as
a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money
and cloth and left, he became once more only a labourer’s child –father’s occupation : labourer was
the entry in the birth certificate F . Z. Ghany had sent–living with a penniless mother in one room
of a mud hut. And throughout life his position was like that. As one of the Tulsi sons-in-law and as
a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his
manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he
returned to his crowded, shabby room.
Tara’s husband, Ajodha, was a thin man with a thin, petulant face which could express
benignity rather than warmth, and Mr. Biswas was not comfortable with him. Ajodha could read but
thought it more dignified to be read to, and Mr. Biswas was sometimes called to the house to read,
for a penny, a newspaper column of which Ajodha was particularly fond. This was a syndicated
American column called That Body of Yours which dealt every day with a different danger to the
human body. Ajodha listened with gravity, concern, alarm. It puzzled Mr. Biswas that he should
subject himself to this torment, and it amazed him that the writer, Dr. Samuel S. Pitkin, could keep
the column going with such regularity. But the doctor never flagged; twenty years later the column
was still going, Ajodha had not lost his taste for it, and occasionally Mr. Biswas’s son read it to
him, for six cents.
So, whenever Mr. Biswas was in Tara’s house, it was as a Brahmin or a reader, with a status
distinct from Dehuti’s, and he had little opportunity of speaking to her.
Bipti had a specific worry about her children: neither Pratap nor Prasad nor Dehuti was
married. She had no plans for Mr. Biswas, since he was still young and she assumed that the
education he was receiving was provision and protection enough. But Tara thought otherwise. And
just when Mr. Biswas was beginning to do stocks and shares, transactions as unreal to Lai as they
were to him, and was learning “Bingen on the Rhine” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist for the
visit of the school inspector, he was taken out of school by Tara and told that he was going to be
made a pundit.
It was only when his possessions were being bundled that he discovered he still had the
school’s copy of the Standard Elocutionist . It was too late to return it, and he never did. Wherever
he went the book went with him, and ended in the blacksmith-built bookcase in the house at Sikkim
Street.
For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and
incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing, its cleanliness and sanctity
maintained by regulations awkward to everyone except himself, Pundit Jairam taught Mr. Biswas
Hindi, introduced him to the more important scriptures and instructed him in various ceremonies.
Morning and evening, under the pundit’s eye, Mr. Biswas did the puja for the pundit’s household.
Jairam’s children had all been married and he lived alone with his wife, a crushed,
hard-working woman whose only duty now was to look after Jairam and his house. She didn’t
complain. Among Hindus Jairam was respected for his knowledge. He also held scandalous views
which, while being dismissed as contentious, had nevertheless brought him much popularity. He
believed in God, fervently, but claimed it was not necessary for a Hindu to do so. He attacked the
custom some families had of putting up a flag after a religious ceremony; but his own front garden
was a veritable grove of bamboo poles with red and white pennants in varying stages of decay. He
ate no meat but spoke against vegetarianism: when Lord Rama went hunting, did they think it was
just for the sport?
He was also working on a Hindi commentary on the Ramayana , and parts of this commentary
were dictated to Mr. Biswas to extend his own knowledge of the language. So that Mr. Biswas
could see and learn, Jairam took him on his rounds; and wherever he went with the pundit Mr.
Biswas, invested with the sacred thread and all the other badges of caste, found himself, as in Tara’s
house, the object of regard. It was his duty on these occasions to do the mechanical side of Jairam’s
offices. He took around the brass plate with the lighted camphor; the devout dropped a coin on the
plate, brushed the flame with their fingers and took their fingers to their forehead. He took around
the consecrated sweetened milk with strips of the tulsi leaf floating on its surface, and doled it out a
teaspoonful at a time. When the ceremonies were over and the feeding of Brahmins began, he was
seated next to Pundit Jairam; and when Jairam had eaten and belched and asked for more and eaten
again it was Mr. Biswas who mixed the bicarbonate of soda for him. Afterwards Mr. Biswas went
to the shrine, a platform of earth decorated with flour and planted with small banana trees, and
pillaged it for the coins that had been offered, hunting carefully everywhere, showing no respect for
the burnt offerings or anything else. The coins, dusted with flour or earth or ash, wet with holy
water or warm from the sacred fire, he took to Pundit Jairam, who might then be engaged in some
philosophical disputation. Jairam would wave Mr. Biswas away without looking at him. As soon as
they got home, however, Jairam asked for the money, counted it, and felt Mr. Biswas all over to
make sure he hadn’t kept anything back. Mr. Biswas also had to bring home all the gifts Jairam
received, usually lengths of cotton, but sometimes cumbersome bundles of fruit and vegetables.
One particularly large gift was a bunch of Gros Michel bananas. They came to Jairam green
and were hung in the large kitchen to ripen. In time the green became lighter, spotted, and soft
yellow patches appeared. Rapidly the yellow spread and deepened, and the spots became brown and
rich. The smell of ripening banana, overcoming the astringent smell of the glutinous sap from the
banana stem, filled the house, leaving Jairam and his wife apparently indifferent, but rousing Mr.
Biswas. He reasoned that the bananas would become ripe all at once, that Jairam and his wife could
not possibly eat them all, and that many would grow rotten. He also reasoned a banana or two
would not be missed. And one day, when Jairam was out and his wife away from the kitchen, Mr.
Biswas picked two bananas and ate them. The gaps in the bunch startled him. They were more than
noticeable; they offended the eye.
Jairam was no flogger. When he was in a rage he might box Mr. Biswas on the ear; but
usually he was less intemperate. For a badly conducted puja , for instance, he might make Mr.
Biswas learn a dozen couplets from the Ramayana by heart, confining him to the house until he
had. All that day Mr. Biswas wondered what punishment the eating of the bananas would bring,
while he copied out Sanskrit verses, which he couldn’t understand, on strips of cardboard, having
revealed to Jairam his skill in lettering.
Jairam came late that evening and his wife fed him. Then, as was his habit every evening after
he had eaten and rested, he walked heavily about the bare verandah, talking to himself, going over
the arguments he had had that day. First he quoted the opposing view. Then he tested various
replies of his own; his voice rose shrill at the end of the final version of the repartee, which he said
over and over, breaking off to sing a snatch of a hymn. Mr. Biswas, lying on his sugarsack and
floursack bed, listened. Jairam’s wife was washing up the dishes in the kitchen; the waste water ran
down a bamboo spout to a gutter, where it fell noisily among the bushes.
Waiting, Mr. Biswas fell asleep. When he awoke it was morning and for a moment he had no
fears. Then his error returned to him.
He had his bath in the yard, cut a hibiscus twig, crushed one end and cleaned his teeth with it,
split the twig and scraped his tongue with the halves. Then he collected marigolds and zinnias and
oleanders from the garden for the morning puja , and sat without religious fervour before the
elaborate shrine. The smell of brass and stale sandalwood paste displeased him; it was a smell he
was to recognize later in all temples, mosques and churches, and it was always disagreeable.
Mechanically he cleaned the images, the lines and indentations of which were black or cream with
old sandalwood paste; it was easier to clean the small smooth pebbles, whose significance had not
yet been explained to him. At this stage Pundit Jairam usually came to see that he did not scamp the
ritual, but this morning he did not come. Mr. Biswas chanted from the prescribed scriptures, applied
fresh sandalwood paste to the images and smooth pebbles, decked them with fresh flowers, rang the
bell and consecrated the offering of sweetened milk. With the sandalwood marks still wet and
tickling on his forehead, he sought out Jairam to offer him some of the milk.
Jairam, bathed and dressed and fresh, was sitting against some pillows in one corner of the
verandah, spectacles low down on his nose, a brown Hindi book on his lap. When the verandah
shook below Mr. Biswas’s bare feet Jairam looked up and then down through his spectacles, and
turned a page of his dingy book. Spectacles made him look older, abstracted and benign.
Mr. Biswas held the brass jar of milk toward him. “Baba.”
Jairam sat up, rearranged a pillow, held a cupped palm, touching the elbow of the outstretched
arm with the fingers of his free hand. Mr. Biswas poured. Jairam brought the inside of his wrist
against his forehead, blessed Mr. Biswas, threw the milk into his mouth, passed his wet palm
through his thin grey hair, readjusted his spectacles and looked down again at his book.
Mr. Biswas went to his room, put on his workaday clothes and came out to breakfast. They
ate in silence. Suddenly Jairam pushed his brass plate towards Mr. Biswas.
“Eat this.”
Mr. Biswas’s fingers, ploughing through some cabbage, stood still.
“Of course you won’t eat it. And I will tell you why. Because I have been eating from this
plate.”
Mr. Biswas’s fingers, feeling dry and dirty, bent and straightened.
“Soanie!”
Jairam’s wife thumped out from the kitchen and stood between them, with her back to Mr.
Biswas. He looked at the creases on the edge of her soles and saw that the soles were hard and dirty.
This surprised him, because Soanie was always washing the floor and bathing herself.
“Go and bring the bananas.”
She pulled the veil over her forehead. “Don’t you think you had better forget it? It is such a
small thing.”
“Small thing! A whole hand of bananas!”
She went to the kitchen and came back, cradling the bananas.
“Put them here, Soanie. Mohun, nobody else can touch these bananas now but yourself. When
people, out of the goodness of their hearts, give me gifts, they are for you. Eh?” Then the edge went
out of his voice and he became like the benign, expounding pundit he was in company. “We
mustn’t waste, Mohun. I have told you that again and again. We mustn’t let these bananas get
rotten. You must finish what you have begun. Start now.”
Mr. Biswas had been lulled by Jairam’s calm, even manner, and the abruptness of the
command took him by surprise. He looked down at his plate and flexed his fingers, the tips of
which were stuck with drying shreds of cabbage.
“Start now.”
Soanie stood in the doorway, blocking the light. Though it was bright day, the room, with
bedrooms on one side and the low roof of the verandah on the other, was gloomy.
“Look. I have peeled one for you.”
The banana hovered in Jairam’s clean hand before Mr. Biswas’s face. He took it with his dirty
fingers, bit and chewed. Surprisingly, it tasted. But the taste was so localized it gave no pleasure. He
then discovered that chewing killed the taste, and chewed deliberately, not tasting, only listening to
the loud squelchy sound that filled his head. He had never heard bananas eaten with so much noise.
Presently the banana was finished, except for the hard little cone buried at the heart of the
banana skin, open like a huge and ugly forest flower.
“Look, Mohun. I have peeled you another.”
And while he ate that, Jairam slowly peeled another. And another, and another.
When he had eaten seven bananas, Mr. Biswas was sick, whereupon Soanie, silently crying,
carried him to the back verandah. He didn’t cry, not from bravery: he was only bored and
uncomfortable. Jairam rose at once and walked heavily to his room, suddenly in a great temper.
Mr. Biswas never ate another banana. That morning also marked the beginning of his stomach
trouble; ever afterwards, whenever he was excited or depressed or angry his stomach swelled until it
was taut with pain.
A more immediate result was that he became constipated. He could no longer relieve himself
in the mornings and he was aware of the dishonour he did the gods by doing the puja unrelieved.
The call came upon him at unpredictable times, and it was this which led to his departure from
Jairam’s, and took him back to that other world he had entered at Pagotes, the world signified by
Lai’s school and the effete rubber-stamps and dusty books of F. Z. Ghany.
One night he got up in a panic. The latrine was far from the house and to go there through the
dark frightened him. He was frightened, too, to walk through the creaking wooden house, open
locks, undo bolts and possibly waken Jairam who was fussy about his sleep and often flew into a
rage even when awakened at a time he had fixed. Mr. Biswas decided to relieve himself in his room
on one of his handkerchiefs. He had scores of these, made from the cotton given him at the
ceremonies he attended with Jairam. When the time came to dispose of the handkerchief, he left his
room and tiptoed, the floor creaking, through the open doorway to the enclosed verandah at the
back. He carefully unbolted the Demerara window, which hung on hinges at the top, and, keeping
the window open with his left hand, flung the handkerchief as far as he could with his right. But his
hands were short, the window was heavy, there was too little space for him to manoeuvre, and he
heard the handkerchief fall not far off.
Not staying to bolt the window, he hurried back to his bed where for a long time he stayed
awake, repeatedly imagining that a fresh call was upon him. He had just fallen asleep, it seemed,
when someone was shaking him. It was Soanie.
Jairam stood scowling in the doorway. “You are no Brahmin,” he said. “I take you into my
house and show you every consideration. I do not ask for gratitude. But you are trying to destroy
me. Go and look at your work.”
The handkerchief had fallen on Jairam’s cherished oleander tree. Never again could its
flowers be used at the puja .
“You will never make a pundit,” Jairam said. “I was talking the other day to Sitaram, who
read your horoscope. You killed your father. I am not going to let you destroy me. Sitaram
particularly warned me to keep you away from trees. Go on, pack your bundle.”
The neighbours had heard and came out to watch Mr. Biswas as, in his dhoti, with his bundle
slung on his shoulder, he walked through the village.
Bipti was not in a welcoming mood when Mr. Biswas, after walking and getting rides on
carts, came back to Pagotes. He was tired, hungry and itching. He had expected her to welcome him
with joy, to curse Jairam and promise that she would never allow him to be sent away again to
strangers. But as soon as he entered the yard of the hut in the back trace he knew that he was wrong.
She looked so depressed and indifferent, sitting in the sooty open kitchen with another of Ajodha’s
poor relations, grinding maize; and it did not then surprise him that, instead of being pleased to see
him, she was alarmed.
They kissed perfunctorily, and she began to ask questions. He thought her manner was harsh
and saw her questions as attacks. His replies were sullen, defensive, angry. Her fury rose and she
shouted at him. She said that he was ungrateful, that all her children were ungrateful and didn’t
appreciate the trouble the rest of the world went to on their behalf. Then her rage spent itself and
she became as understanding and protective as he hoped she would have been right at the
beginning. But it was not sweet now. She poured water for him to wash his hands, sat him down on
a low bench and gave him food–not hers to give, for this was the communal food of the house, to
which she had contributed nothing but her labour in the cooking–and looked after him in the proper
way. But she could not coax him out of his sullenness.
He did not see at the time how absurd and touching her behaviour was: welcoming him back
to a hut that didn’t belong to her, giving him food that wasn’t hers. But the memory remained, and
nearly thirty years later, when he was a member of a small literary group in Port of Spain, he wrote
and read out a simple poem in blank verse about this meeting. The disappointment, his surliness, all
the unpleasantness was ignored, and the circumstances improved to allegory: the journey, the
welcome, the food, the shelter.
After the meal he learned that there was another reason for Bipti’s annoyance. Dehuti had run
away with Tara’s yard boy, not only showing ingratitude to Tara and bringing disgrace to her, for
the yard boy is the lowest of the low, but also depriving her at one blow of two trained servants.
“And it was Tara who wanted you to be a pundit,” Bipti said. “I don’t know what we are
going to tell her.”
“Tell me about Dehuti,” he said.
Bipti had little to say. No one had been to see Dehuti; Tara had vowed never to mention her
name again. Bipti spoke as if she herself deserved every reproach for Dehuti’s behaviour; and
though she declared she could have nothing more to do with Dehuti, her manner suggested that she
had to defend Dehuti not only against Tara’s anger, but also Mr. Biswas’s.
But he felt no anger or shame. When he asked about Dehuti he was only remembering the girl
who pressed his dirty clothes to her face and wept when she thought her brother was dead.
Bipti sighed. “I don’t know what Tara is going to say now. You had better go and see her
yourself
And Tara was not angry. True to her vow, she did not mention Dehuti. Ajodha, to whom
Jairam had given only a hint of Mr. Biswas’s misdemeanour, laughed in his high-pitched, breathless
way and tried to get Mr. Biswas to tell exactly what had happened. Mr. Biswas’s embarrassment
delighted Ajodha and Tara, until he was laughing too; and then, in the cosy back verandah of Tara’s
house–though it had mud walls it stood on proper pillars, had a neat thatched roof and wooden
ledges on the half-walls, and was bright with pictures of Hindu gods–he told about the bananas,
blusteringly at first, but when he noticed that Tara was giving him sympathy he saw his own injury
very clearly, broke down and wept, and Tara held him to her bosom and dried his tears. So that the
scene he had pictured as taking place with his mother took place with Tara.
Ajodha had bought a motorbus and opened a garage, and it was in the garage that Alec
worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things. Grease
blackened his hairy legs; grease had turned his white canvas shoes black; grease blackened his
hands even beyond the wrist; grease made his short working trousers black and stiff. Yet he had the
gift, which Mr. Biswas admired, of being able to hold a cigarette between greasy fingers and greasy
lips without staining it. His lips still twisted easily and his small humorous eyes still squinted; but
the cheeks had already sunk on his small square face and he now had a perpetual air of abstraction
and debauch.
Mr. Biswas did not join Alec in the garage. Tara sent him to the rumshop. This had been
Ajodha’s first business venture and had provided the money for some of his subsequent exploits.
But, with Ajodha’s growing success, the importance of the rumshop had declined and it was now
run by his brother Bhandat, about whom there were unpleasant rumours: Bhandat apparently drank,
beat his wife and kept a mistress of another race.
Bipti, who had not been consulted, was very grateful to Tara. And Mr. Biswas was thrilled at
the thought of earning money. He was not going to earn much. He was to live at the shop and be fed
by Bhandat’s wife; he was to be given suits of clothes every now and then; and he was to get two
dollars a month.
The rumshop was a long high building of simple design, flat to the ground, with a pitched roof
of corrugated iron rising from concrete walls. Swing doors exposed only the wet floor of the shop
and the feet of drinkers, and, in a land where all doors are wide open, gave a touch of vice to the
building. The doors were needed, for many of the people who came past them meant to drink
themselves into insensibility. At any time of the day there were people who had collapsed on the
wet floor, men who looked older than they were, women too; useless people crying in corners, their
anguish lost in the din and press of the standing drinkers who swallowed their rum at a gulp, made a
face, hastily swallowed water, and bought more rum. There was swearing, boasting, threatening;
fights, broken bottles, policemen; and steadily the coppers and the silver and the notes went into the
greasy drawer below the shelves.
And every evening, when the shop was emptied, when the sleepers had been put outside and
the broken bottles and glasses swept up, and the floor washed down–though no amount of water
could get rid of the smell of raw rum–the drawer was pulled out and the Petromax gas lamp, taken
down from the long wire hook that hung from the ceiling, was placed next to the drawer on the
counter. The money was arranged in neat piles and Bhandat noted the day’s takings on a sheet of
stiff brown paper, smooth on one side, rough on the other. Bhandat wrote on the smooth side with a
soft pencil that smudged easily. The shop had thick edges of darkness; the smell of dirty boards and
stale rum was sharp; and Bhandat made his calculation in whispers against the noise of the
Petromax whose hiss, lost in the din of the evening, had now in the silence swollen into a roar.
Bhandat’s voice, even when low, was a whine with a querulous edge. He was a small man,
with a nose as sharp as Ajodha’s and a face as thin; but this face could never express benignity;
always it looked harassed and irritable, and more so than ever at the end of the evening. He was
going bald and the curve of his forehead repeated the curve of his nose. His thin upper lip was
heavily outlined and had two neat and equal bumps in the middle which pressed in a swollen way
over the lower lip and practically hid it. While Bhandat calculated Mr. Biswas studied these bumps.
Bhandat made it clear that he regarded Mr. Biswas as Tara’s spy and distrusted him. And it
was not long before Mr. Biswas realized that Bhandat was stealing, and that these feverish nightly
calculations were meant to frustrate Tara’s weekly checks. He was not surprised or critical. Only, he
was embarrassed by some of Bhandat’s methods.
“When these people have three or four drinks and want another,” Bhandat said, “don’t give
them full measure.”
Mr. Biswas asked no questions.
Bhandat looked away and explained, “It is for their own good really.”
Mr. Biswas got to know when Bhandat felt he had given short measure often enough to risk
pocketing the price of a drink. Bhandat stared straight at the man who had paid him, talked absurdly
for a moment, then began to spin the coin. Whenever Mr. Biswas saw a coin rising and falling
through the air he knew that it would eventually land in Bhandat’s pocket.
Directly afterwards Bhandat became as gay as he could with the customers, and suspicious
and irritable with Mr. Biswas. “You,” he would say to Mr. Biswas. “What the hell are you looking
at?” And sometimes he would say to people across the counter, “Look at him. Always smiling, eh?
As though he is smarter than everybody else. Look at him.”
“Yes,” the drinkers said. “He is a real smart man. You better keep an eye on him, Bhandat.”
So to the drinkers Mr. Biswas became “smart man” or “smart boy”, someone who could be
ridiculed.
He revenged himself by spitting in the rum when he bottled it, which he did early every
morning. The rum was the same, but the prices and labels were different: “Indian Maiden”, “The
White Cock”, “Parakeet”. Each brand had its adherents, and to Mr. Biswas this was a subsidiary
revenge which gave a small but continuous pleasure.
The bottling-room was in the ancillary shop-buildings which formed a square about an
unpaved yard. Bhandat lived with his family, and Mr. Biswas, in two rooms. When it was dry
Bhandat’s wife cooked on the steps that led to one of these rooms; when it rained she cooked in a
corrugated-iron shack, made by Bhandat during a period of sobriety and responsibility, in the yard.
The other rooms were used as storerooms or were rented out to other families. The room in which
Mr. Biswas slept had no window and was perpetually dark. His clothes hung on a nail on one wall;
his books occupied a small amount of floor space; he slept with Bhandat’s two sons on a hard,
smelly coconut fibre mattress on the floor. Every morning the mattress was rolled up, leaving a
deposit of coarse fibre grit on the floor, and pushed under Bhandat’s fourposter in the adjacent
room. When this was done Mr. Biswas felt he had no further claim to the room for the rest of the
day.
On Sundays and on Thursday afternoons, when the shop was closed, he didn’t know where to
go. Sometimes he went to the back trace to see his mother. He was giving her a dollar a month, but
she continued to make him feel helpless and unhappy, and he preferred to seek out Alec. But Alec
was now seldom to be found and Mr. Biswas often ended by going to Tara’s. In the back verandah
there the bookcase had been unexpectedly filled with twenty tall black volumes of the Book of
Comprehensive Knowledge . Ajodha had agreed to buy the books from an American travelling
salesman; even before he had paid a deposit the books had been delivered, and then apparendy
forgotten. The salesman never called again, no one asked to be paid, and Ajodha said happily that
the company had gone bankrupt. He had no intention of reading the books, but they were a bargain;
and when Mr. Biswas proved the books’ usefulness by coming week after week to read them,
Ajodha was delighted.
Presently Mr. Biswas fell into a Sunday routine. He went to Tara’s in the middle of the
morning, read for Ajodha all the That Body of Yours columns which had been cut out during the
week, got his penny, was given lunch, and was then free to explore the Book of Comprehensive
Knowledge . He read folk tales from various lands; he read, and quickly forgot, how chocolate,
matches, ships, buttons and many other things were made; he read articles which answered, with
drawings that looked pretty but didn’t really help, questions like: Why does ice make water cold?
Why does fire burn? Why does sugar sweeten?
“You must get Bhandat’s boys to read these books too,” Ajodha said enthusiastically.
But Bhandat’s boys refused to be enticed. They were learning to smoke; they were full of
scandalous and incredible revelations about sex; and at night, in whispers, they wove lurid sexual
fantasies. Mr. Biswas had tried to contribute to these, but could never strike the correct note. He
was either so tame or so ill-informed that they laughed, or so revolting that they threatened to tell.
For weeks they tormented him with a particular indecency he had spoken until, in exasperation, he
told them to go and tell and found, to his surprise, that he had put an end to their threats. And one
night when he asked Bhandat’s eldest boy how he had come by all his knowledge about sex, the
boy said, “Well, I have a mother, not so?”
Bhandat was spending more week-ends away from the shop. His sons talked openly of his
mistress, at first with excitement and a little pride; later, when the rows between Bhandat and his
wife grew more frequent, with fear. There were moments of shock and humiliation when Bhandat
shouted obscenities which his sons casually whispered at night. The silence of Bhandat’s wife then
was terrible. Occasionally things were thrown and the boys and Mr. Biswas burst out screaming.
Bhandat’s wife would come, very calm, and try to quieten them. They wanted her to stay, but she
always went back to Bhandat in the next room.
In the shop Bhandat was spinning more coins every day, and there were often scenes on
Friday evening when Tara came to examine the accounts.
Then one week-end Mr. Biswas had the two rooms to himself. One of Ajodha’s relations died
in another part of the island. The shop was not opened on Saturday and early that morning Bhandat
and his family went to the funeral, with Ajodha and Tara. The empty rooms, usually oppressive,
now held unlimited prospects of freedom and vice; but Mr. Biswas could think of nothing vicious
and satisfying. He smoked but that gave little pleasure. And gradually the rooms lost their thrill.
Alec had given up his job in the garage, or had been sacked, and was not in Pagotes; Tara’s house
was closed; and Mr. Biswas did not want to go to the back trace. But the feeling of freedom and
urgency remained. He walked aimlessly, along the main road and down side streets he had never
taken. He stopped buses and went for short rides. He had innumerable soft drinks and hard cakes at
roadside shacks. The afternoon wore on. Groups of men, their week’s work over, stood in week-end
clothes at street corners, outside shops, around coconut-carts. As fatigue overcame him he began to
long for the day to end, to relieve him of his freedom. He went back to the dark rooms tired, empty,
miserable, yet still excited, still unwilling to sleep.
He awoke to find Bhandat standing over his mattress on the floor. Above red eyes Bhandat’s
lids were swollen, the way they became after he had been drinking. Mr. Biswas had not expected
anyone to return before evening; he had lost a whole day’s freedom.
“Come on. Stop pretending. Where have you put it?” The bumps on Bhandat’s top lip were
quivering with anger.
“Put what?”
“Oh yes. Smart man. So you don’t know?” And Bhandat pulled Mr. Biswas off the mattress,
grabbed him by the back of his trousers and lifted him to his toes. With this hold, widely known in
Lai’s school as the policeman’s hold, Bhandat led Mr. Biswas to the next room. No one else was
there; Bhandat’s wife and children had not come back from the funeral. A shirt hung on the back of
a chair over a pair of neatly folded trousers. On the seat of the chair there were coins, keys and a
number of crumpled dollar-notes.
“Last night I had twenty-six dollars in notes. This morning I have twenty-five. Eh?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know when you came in. I was sleeping all the time.”
“Sleeping. Yes, sleeping like the snake. With both eyes open. Big eyes and long tongue.
Tongue wagging all the time to Tara and Ajodha. Do you think that has done you any good? You
expect them to give you a pound and a crown for that?” He was shouting now, and pulling out his
leather belt through the loops of his trousers. “Eh? You will tell them you stole my dollar?” He
raised his arm and brought the belt down on Mr. Biswas’s head. Whenever the buckle struck a bone
it made a sharp sound.
Suddenly Mr. Biswas howled. “O God! O God! My eye! My eye!”
Bhandat stopped.
Mr. Biswas had been cut on the cheek-bone and the blood had run below his eye.
“Get out, you nasty tale-carrying lout. Get out of here at once before I peel the skin off your
back.” The bumps on Bhandat’s lip were trembling again and his arm, when he raised it, was
quivering.
The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr. Biswas roused Bipti.
“Mohun! What has happened?”
“I fell down. Don’t ask me.”
“Come, tell me. What’s the matter?”
“Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?”
“Who beat you?” She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced.
“Bhandat beat you?” She undid his shirt and saw the weals on his back. “He beat you? He beat
you?”
She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a
baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.
“I am never going back there,” Mr. Biswas said.
Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, “Where
will you go then?”
He became impatient. “You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.”
He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. “It is my fate. I have had no luck with my
children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was
true.”
“I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he
say?”
“That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.”
“Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very
heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?”
“Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.”
“Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.”
“Mohun!” Then Bipti said, “I don’t know what Tara is going to say.”
“Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don’t want you to go and see Tara. I
don’t want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his. Let Bhandat’s boys read to
him. I am finished with that.”
But Bipti went to see Tara, and that afternoon Tara, still in her mourning clothes and her
jewellery, fresh from her funeral duties and her struggles with the funeral photographer, came to the
back trace.
“Poor Mohun,” Tara said. “He’s shameless, that Bhandat.”
“I am sure he stole the money himself,” Mr. Biswas said. “He’s got a lot of practice. He steals
all the time. And I can always tell when he is stealing. He spins the coin.”
“Mohun!” Bipti said.
“He’s the lecher, spendthrift and liar. Not me.”
“Mohun!”
“And I know all about that other woman. His sons know about her too. They boast about it.
He quarrels with his wife and beats her. I am not going back to that shop if he comes and asks me
on bended knee.”
“I can’t see Bhandat doing that,” Tara said. “But he is sorry. The dollar wasn’t missing. It was
at the bottom of his trouser pocket and he didn’t notice it.”
“He was too drunk, if you ask me.” Then the humiliation hurt afresh and he began to cry.
“You see, Ma. I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want.”
Tara became coaxing.
Mr. Biswas, enjoying the coaxing and his misery, still spoke angrily. “Dehuti was quite right
to run away from you. I am sure you treated her badly.”
By mentioning Dehuti’s name he had gone too far. Tara at once stiffened and, without saying
more, left, her long skirt billowing about her, the silver bracelets on her arm clanking.
Bipti ran out after her to the yard. “You mustn’t mind the boy, Tara. He is young.”
“I don’t mind, Bipti.”
“Oh Mohun,” Bipti said, when she came back to the room, “you will reduce us all to
pauperdom. You will see me spending the rest of my days in the Poor House.”
“I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished
with this.” He waved his aching arm about the mud walls and the low, sooty thatch.
On Monday morning he set about looking for a job. How did one look for a job? He supposed
that one looked. He walked up and down the Main Road, looking.
He passed a tailor and tried to picture himself cutting khaki cloth, tacking, and operating a
sewingmachine. He passed a barber and tried to picture himself stropping a razor; his mind
wandered off to devise elaborate protections for his left thumb. But he didn’t like the tailor he saw,
a fat man sulkily sewing in a dingy shop; and as for barbers, he had never liked those who cut his
own hair; he thought too how it would disgust Pundit Jairam to learn that his former pupil had taken
up barbering, a profession immemorially low. He walked on.
He had no wish to enter any of the shops he saw and ask for a job. So he imposed difficult
conditions on himself. He tried, for example, to walk a certain distance in twenty paces, and
interpreted failure as a bad sign. For a moment he was perversely tempted by an undertaker’s, a
plain corrugated iron shed that made no concession to grief, smelling of new wood, fish-glue and
french polish, with coffins lying on the floor among sawdust, shavings and unfashioned planks.
Cheap coffins and raw wood stood in rows against one wall; expensive polished coffins rested on
shelves; there were unfinished coffins around a work-bench and pieces of coffin everywhere else; in
one corner there was a tottering stack of cheap toy coffins for babies. Mr. Biswas had often seen
babies’ funerals; one in particular he remembered, where the coffin was carried under the arm of a
man who rode slowly on a bicycle. “Get a job there,” he thought, “and help to bury Bhandat.” He
passed dry goods shops–strange name: dry goods–and the rickety little rooms bulged with dry
goods, things like pans and plates and bolts of cloth and cards of bright pins and boxes of thread and
shirts on hangers and brand-new oil lamps and hammers and saws and clothes-pegs and everything
else, the wreckage of a turbulent flood which appeared to have forced the doors of the shops open
and left deposits of dry goods on tables and on the ground outside. The owners remained in their
shops, lost in the gloom and wedged between dry goods. The assistants stood outside with pencils
behind their ears or pencils tapping bill-pads with the funereally-coloured carbon paper peeping out
from under the first sheet. Grocers’ shops, smelling damply of oil, sugar and salted fish. Vegetable
stalls, damp but fresh, and smelling of earth. Grocers’ wives and children stood oily and confident
behind counters. The women behind the vegetable stalls were old and correct with thin mournful
faces; or they were young and plump with challenging and quarrelsome stares; with a big-eyed
child or two hanging about behind the purple sweet potatoes to which dirt still clung; and babies in
the background lying in condensed milk boxes. And all the time donkey-carts, horse-carts and
ox-carts rumbled and jangled in the roadway, the heavy iron-rimmed wheels grating over gravel and
sand and wobbling over the bumpy road. Continually long whips with knotted ends whistled and
cracked, arousing brief enthusiasm in the animals. The men drivers sat on their carts; the boy
drivers stood, shouting and whistling at their animals and their rivals; half a dozen races were
always in progress.
Mr. Biswas returned to the back trace, his resolution shaken. “I am not going to take any job
at all,” he told Bipti.
“Why don’t you go and make it up with Tara?”
“I don’t want to see Tara. I am going to kill myself
“That would be the best thing for you. And for me.”
“Good. Good . I don’t want any food.” And in a great rage he left the hut.
Anger gave him energy, and he determined to walk until he was tired. On the Main Road he
took the other direction now and went past the office of F. Z. Ghany, dingier but still intact, closed
because it wasn’t market day; past the same array of shops, it seemed, the same owners, the same
goods, the same assistants; and it all filled him with the same depression.
Late in the afternoon, when he was some miles out of Pagotes, a slender young man with
shining eyes and a thick shining moustache came up to Mr. Biswas and tapped him on the shoulder.
He was embarrassed to recognize Ramchand, Tara’s delinquent yard boy, now Dehuti’s husband.
He had sometimes seen him at Tara’s, but they had not spoken.
Ramchand, so far from showing embarrassment, behaved as though he had known Mr.
Biswas well for years. He asked so many questions so quickly that Mr. Biswas had time only to
nod. “How is everything? It is good to see you. And your mother? Well? Nice to hear. And the
shop? A funny thing. You know Parakeet and Indian Maiden and The White Cock? I make that rum
now. They are the same, you know.”
“I know.”
“No future working for Tara, I can tell you. As you know, I am working at this rum place
now, and do you know how much I am getting? Come on. Guess.”
“Ten dollars.”
“Twelve. With a bonus every Christmas. And rum at the wholesale price into the bargain. Not
bad, eh?”
Mr. Biswas was impressed.
“Dehuti talks about you all the time. At one time everybody thought you were drowned,
remember?” Then, as though this knowledge had removed whatever unfamiliarity remained
between them, Ramchand added, “Why don’t you come and see Dehuti? She was talking about you
only last night.” He paused. “And perhaps you could eat something as well.”
Mr. Biswas noticed the pause. It reminded him that Ramchand was of a low caste; and though
it was absurd in the Main Road to think that of a man earning twelve dollars a month in addition to
bonuses and other advantages, Mr. Biswas was flattered that Ramchand looked upon him as
someone to be flattered and conciliated. He agreed to go to see Dehuti. Ramchand, delighted, talked
on, revealing much knowledge of other members of the family. He told Mr. Biswas that Ajodha’s
finances were not as sound as they appeared, and that Tara was offending too many people. Tara
may have vowed never to mention Ramchand’s name again; he appeared anxious to mention hers as
often as possible.
Mr. Biswas had never questioned the deference shown him when he had gone to Tara’s to be
fed as a Brahmin and on his rounds with Pundit Jairam. But he had never taken it seriously; he had
thought of it as one of the rules of a game that was only occasionally played. When he got to
Ramchand’s he thought it even more of a game. The hut indicated lowness in no way. The mud
walls had been freshly whitewashed and decorated with blue and green and red palm-prints (Mr.
Biswas recognized Ramchand’s broad palm and stubby fingers); the thatch was new and neat; the
earth floor was high and had been packed hard; pictures from calendars were stuck on the walls, and
in the verandah there was a hatrack. It was altogether less depressing than the crumbling, neglected
hut in the back trace.
But it seemed that to Dehuti marriage had brought no joy. She was uneasy at being caught
among her household possessions, and tried to hint that they had nothing to do with her. When
Ramchand started to point out some attractive feature of the hut, she sucked her teeth and he
desisted. Mr. Biswas couldn’t believe that Dehuti had ever spoken about him, as Ramchand had
said. She hardly spoke, hardly looked at him. Without expression she brought out an ugly baby
from an inner room, asleep, and showed it, suggesting at the same time that she had not brought it
out to show it. She looked careworn and sulky, untouched by her husband’s bubbling desire to
please. Yet in her unhurried way she did what she could to make Mr. Biswas welcome. He
understood that she feared rebuff and the reports he might take back, and this made him
uncomfortable.
Dehuti, never pretty, was now frankly ugly. Her Chinese eyes looked sleepy, the pupils
without a light, the whites smudged. Her cheeks, red with pimples, bulged low and drooped around
her mouth. Her lower lip projected, as though squashed out by the weight of her cheeks. She sat on
a low bench, the back of her long skirt caught tightly between her calves and the backs of her
thighs, the front draped over the knees. Mr. Biswas was surprised by her adulthood. It was the way
she sat, knees apart, yet so decorously covered; he had associated that only with mature women. He
tried to find in the woman the girl he had known. But seeing her growing needlessly impatient while
Ramchand, at her instructions, lit the fire and prepared to boil the rice, Mr. Biswas felt that this
sight of Dehuti had wiped out the old picture. This was a loss; it added to the unhappiness he had
begun to feel as soon as he entered the hut.
Ramchand came from the kitchen and sank in the most relaxed way on to the earth floor. He
stretched out one short-trousered leg and held his hands around his upright knee. The corrugations
of his thick hair glinted with oil. He smiled at Mr. Biswas, smiled at the baby, smiled at Dehuti. He
asked Mr. Biswas to read the writing on the calendar pictures and the Sunday school cards on the
walls, and listened in pure pleasure while Mr. Biswas did so.
“You are going to be a great man,” Ramchand said. “A great man. Reading like that at your
age. Used to hear you reading those things to Ajodha. Never known a healthier man in all my life.
But one day he is going to fall really sick, let him watch out. He’s just asking for it. I feel sorry for
him, to tell you the truth. I feel sorry for all these rich fellows.” It turned out that Ramchand felt
sorry for many other people as well. “Pratap now. He’s got himself into a mess because of these
donkeys he keeps on buying, heaven knows why. The last two died. Did you hear about it?” Mr.
Biswas hadn’t, and Ramchand told of the bloody end of the donkeys; one had speared itself on a
bamboo stake. He also spoke of Prasad and his search for a wife; with tolerant amusement he
mentioned Bhandat and his mistress. He became increasingly avuncular; it was clear he thought his
own condition perfect, and this perfection delighted him. “Not finished with these decorations,” he
said, pointing to the walls. “Getting some more of those Sunday school pictures. Jesus and Mary.
Eh, Dehuti?” Laughingly he flung the matchstick he had been chewing at the baby.
Dehuti closed her eyes in annoyance, puffed out her pimply cheeks a little more and turned
her face away. The matchstick fell harmlessly on the baby.
“Making some improvements too,” Ramchand said. “Come.”
This time Dehuti did not suck her teeth. They went to the back and Mr. Biswas saw another
room being added to the hut. Trimmed tree-branches had been buried in the earth; the rafters, of
lesser boughs, were in place; between the uprights the bamboo had been plaited; the earth floor was
raised but not yet packed. “Extra room,” Ramchand said. “When it is finished you can come and
stay with us.”
Mr. Biswas’s depression deepened.
They went on a tour of the small hut, Ramchand pointing out the refinements he had added:
shelves set in the mud walls, tables, chairs. Back in the verandah Ramchand pointed to the hatrack.
There were eight hooks on it symmetrically arranged about a diamond-shaped glass. “That is the
only thing here I didn’t make myself. Dehuti set her heart on it.” He slumped down on the floor
again and flung the little ball of earth he had been rolling between his fingers at the baby.
Dehuti closed her eyes and pouted. “Me? I didn’t want it. I wish you would stop running
round giving people the idea that I have modern ambitions.”
He laughed uneasily and scratched his bare leg; the nails left white marks.
“I have no hat to hang on a hatrack,” Dehuti said. “I don’t want a mirror to show me my ugly
face.”
Ramchand scratched and winked at Mr. Biswas. “Ugly face? Ugly face?”
Dehuti said, “I don’t stand up in front of the hatrack combing my hair for hours. My hair is
not pretty and curly enough.”
Ramchand accepted the compliment with a smile.
In the verandah, black and yellow in the light of the oil lamp, they sat down on low benches to
eat. But although he was hungry, and although he knew that both Dehuti and Ramchand had much
affection for him, Mr. Biswas found that his belly was beginning to rise and hurt, and he couldn’t
eat. Their happiness, which he couldn’t share, had upset him. And it pained him more then to see
Ramchand’s jumpy enthusiasm replaced by uncertainty. Dehuti’s sullen expression never changed;
it was for just such a rebuff that she had been prepared.
He left soon after, promising to come back and see them one day, knowing that he wouldn’t,
that the links between Dehuti and himself, never strong, had been broken, that from her too he had
become separate. The desire to keep on looking for a job had left him. He supposed he had always
known he would fall back on Tara for help. She liked him; Ajodha liked him. Perhaps he would
apologize, and they would put him in the garage.
Then Alec reappeared in Pagotes, and there was no sign of engine grease on him. His hands
and arms and face were spotted and streaked with paint of various colours, as were his long khaki
trousers and white shirt, where each stain was rimmed with oil. When, at the end of a long, idle and
uncertain week, Mr. Biswas saw him, Alec had a small tin of paint in one hand and a small brush in
the other; he was standing on a ladder against a caf in the Main Road and painting a sign, of which
he had already achieved THE HUMMING BIRD CA.
Mr. Biswas was full of admiration.
“You like it, eh?” Alec came down the ladder, pulled out a large paint-spotted cloth from his
back pocket and wiped his hands. “Got to shadow them. In two colours. Blue across, green down.”
“But that will spoil it, man.”
Alec spat out a cigarette that had burned down to his lips and gone dead. “It will look like a
little carnival when I finish. But that is the way they want it.” He jerked his head contemptuously
towards the proprietor of the Humming Bird Caf who was leaning on his counter and looking at
them suspiciously. The shelves at his back were half filled with bottles of aerated water. Flies
buzzed about him, attracted by the sweat on his neck and those parts of his body exposed by his
vest; flies with different tastes had settled on the coarse sugar on the rock cakes in his showcase.
To Alec Mr. Biswas explained his problem, and they talked for a while. Then they went into
the tiny caf and Alec bought two bottles of aerated water.
Alec said to the proprietor, “This is my assistant.”
The proprietor looked at Mr. Biswas. “How he so small?”
“Young firm,” Alec said. “Give youth a chance.”
“He could paint humming birds?”
“He want a lot of humming birds in the sign,” Alec explained to Mr. Biswas. “Hanging about
and behind the lettering.”
“Like the Keskidee Caf ,” the proprietor said. “You see the sign he got?” He pointed
obliquely across the road to another refreshment shack, and Mr. Biswas saw the sign. The letters
were blocked in three colours and shadowed in three other colours. Keskidee birds stood on the K,
perched on the D, hung from the C; on EE two keskidees billed.
Mr. Biswas couldn’t draw.
Alec said, “‘Course he could paint humming birds, if you really want them. The only thing is,
it would look a little follow-fashion.”
“And too besides, it oldfashion,” Mr. Biswas said.
“I glad you say that,” Alec said. “Was what I been trying to tell him. The modern thing is to
have lots of words. All the shops in Port of Spain have signs with nothing but words. Tell him.”
“What sort of words?” the proprietor said.
“Sweet drinks, cakes and ice,” Mr. Biswas said.
The proprietor shook his head.
“Beware of the dog,” Alec said.
“I ain’t got a dog.”
“Fresh fruits daily,” Alec went on. “Stick no bills by order.”
The proprietor shook his head.
“Trespassers will be prosecuted. Overseas visitors welcomed. If you don’t see what you
require please ask. Our assistants will be pleased to help you with your inquiries.”
The proprietor was thinking.
“No hands wanted,” Alec said. “Come in and look around.”
The proprietor became alert. “Is exactly what I have to fight in this place.”
“Idlers keep out,” Mr. Biswas said.
“By order,” the proprietor said.
“Idlers keep out by order. A good sign,” Alec said. “This boy will do it for you in two twos.”
So Mr. Biswas became a sign-writer and wondered why he had never thought of using this
gift before. With Alec’s help he worked on the caf sign and to his delight and amazement it came
out well enough to satisfy the proprietor. He had been used to designing letters with pen and pencil
and was afraid that he would not be able to control a brush with paint. But he found that the brush,
though flattening out disconcertingly at first, could be made to respond to the gentlest pressure;
strokes were cleaner, curves truer. “Just turn the brush slowly in your fingers when you come to the
curve,” Alec said; and curves held fewer problems after that. After IDLERS KEEP OUT BY
ORDER he did more signs with Alec; his hand became surer, his strokes bolder, his feeling for
letters finer. He thought R and S the most beautiful of Roman letters; no letter could express so
many moods as R, without losing its beauty; and what could compare with the swing and rhythm of
S? With a brush, large letters were easier than small, and he felt much satisfaction after he and Alec
had covered long stretches of palings with signs for Pluko, which was good for the hair in various
ways, and Anchor Cigarettes. There was some worry about the cigarette packet; they would have
preferred to draw it closed, but the contractors wanted it open, condemning Mr. Biswas and Alec to
draw not only the packet, but the silver foil, crumpled, and eight cigarettes, all marked ANCHOR,
pulled out to varying lengths.
After a time he started to go again to Tara’s. She bore him no ill-will but he was disappointed
to find that Ajodha no longer required him to read That Body of Yours . One of Bhandat’s sons now
did that. Two things had happened in the rum-shop. Bhandat’s wife had died in childbirth, and
Bhandat had left his sons and gone to live with his mistress in Port of Spain. The boys were taken in
by Tara, who added Bhandat’s name to those never mentioned by her again. For years afterwards no
one knew where or how Bhandat lived, though there were rumours that he lived in a slum in the city
centre, surrounded by all sorts of quarrelling and disreputable people.
So Bhandat’s sons moved from the squalor of the rum-shop to the comfort of Tara’s house. It
was a passage that Mr. Biswas had made often himself, and it was no surprise to him that the boys
had soon settled in so well that Bhandat was forgotten and it was hard to think of his sons living
anywhere else.
Mr. Biswas continued to paint signs. It was satisfying work, but it came irregularly. Alec
wandered from district to district, sometimes working, sometimes not, and the partnership was
spasmodic. There were many weeks when Mr. Biswas was out of work and could only read and
design letters and practise his drawing. He learned to draw bottles, and in preparation for Christmas
drew one Santa Claus after another until he had reduced it to a simple design in red, pink, white and
black. Work, when it came, came in a rush. In September most shopkeepers said that they wanted
no Christmas-signs nonsense that year. By December they had changed their minds, and Mr.
Biswas worked late into the night doing Santa Clauses and holly and berries and snow-capped
letters; the finished signs quickly blistered in the blazing sun. Occasionally there were inexplicable
rashes of new signs, and a district was thronged for a fortnight or so with sign-writers, for no
shopkeeper wished to employ a man who had been used by his rival. Every sign then was required
to be more elaborate than the last, and for stretches the Main Road was dazzling with signs that
were hard to read. Plainness was required only for the posters for Local Road Board Elections. Mr.
Biswas did scores of these, many on cotton, which he had to stretch and pin to the mud wall of the
verandah in the back trace. The paint leaked through and the wall became a blur of conflicting
messages in different colours.
To satisfy the extravagant lettering tastes of his shopkeepers he scanned foreign magazines.
From looking at magazines for their letters he began to read them for their stories, and during his
long weeks of leisure he read such novels as he could find in the stalls of Pagotes. He read the
novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli. They introduced him to intoxicating worlds. Descriptions of
landscape and weather in particular excited him; they made him despair of finding romance in his
own dull green land which the sun scorched every day; he never had much taste for westerns.
He became increasingly impatient at living in the back trace; and although his income, despite
Christmas, elections and shopkeepers’ jealousies, was small and uncertain, he would have liked to
risk moving. But Bipti, who had always talked of moving, now said she had lived there too long and
did not want to be among strangers in her old age. “I leave here. One day you will get married, and
where shall I be then?”
“I am never going to get married.” It was his usual threat, for Bipti had begun to say that she
had only to see Mr. Biswas married and her life’s work would be complete. Pratap and Prasad were
already married, Pratap to a tall, handsome woman who was bearing a child every eighteen months,
Prasad to a woman of appalling ugliness who was mercifully barren.
“You mustn’t say things like that,” Bipti said. She could still irritate him by taking everything
he said seriously.
“So what? You expect me to bring a wife here?” He walked about the cluttered room, always
smelling now of paint and oil and turpentine, and kicked at the dusty brown piles of his magazines
and books on the floor.
He stayed in the back trace and read Samuel Smiles. He had bought one of his books in the
belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was as romantic and satisfying
as any novelist, and Mr. Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was
poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came a point when resemblance ceased.
The heroes had rigid ambitions and lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued and had a
meaning. He had no ambition, and in this hot land, apart from opening a shop or buying a motorbus,
what could he do? What could he invent? Dutifully, however, he tried. He bought elementary
manuals of science and read them; nothing happened; he only became addicted to elementary
manuals of science. He bought the seven expensive volumes of Hawkins’ Electrical Guide , made
rudimentary compasses, buzzers and doorbells, and learned to wind an armature. Beyond that he
could not go. Experiments became more complex, and he didn’t know where in Trinidad he could
find the equipment mentioned so casually by Hawkins. His interest in electrical matters died, and he
contented himself with reading about the Samuel Smiles heroes in their magic land.
And yet there were moments when he could persuade himself that he lived in a land where
romance was possible. When, for instance, he had to do a rush job and worked late into the night by
the light of a gas lamp, excitement and the light transforming the hut; able then to forget that
ordinary morning would come and the sign would hang over a cluttered little shop with its doors
open on to a hot dusty road.
There were the days when he became a conductor on one of Ajodha’s buses which ran in
competition with other buses on a route without fixed stops. He enjoyed the urgent motion and
noisy rivalry, and endangered himself needlessly by hanging far out from the running-board to sing
to people on the road, “Tunapuna, Naparima, Sangre Grande, Guayaguayare, Chacachacare,
Mahatma Gandhi and back,” the glorious Amerindian names forming an imaginary route that took
in the four corners of the island and one place, Chacachacare, across the sea.
And there were times when elusive Alec, with a face that hinted of debauch, came to Pagotes,
spoke of pleasures and took Mr. Biswas to certain houses which terrified, then attracted, and finally
only amused him. With Bhandat’s boys he also went; but they seemed to get most of their pleasure
from the thought that they were being vicious.
And now too there were other occasions of excitement, unrelated to the excitements of books
and magazines, unrelated to the visits to those houses: the glimpse of a face, a smile, a laugh. But
his experiences had taken him beyond the stage when a girl was something of painful loveliness,
and it was a marvel that any creature so soft and lovely could welcome the attentions of hard, ugly
men; and few persons now held him. Some features always finally repelled, a tone of voice, a
quality of skin, an over-sensuous hang of lip; one such lip had grown gross and obscene in a dream
which left him feeling unclean. Love was something he was embarrassed to think about; the very
word he mentioned seldom, and then as mockingly as Alec and Bhandat’s boys. But secretly he
believed.
Alec, misunderstanding, said, “You worry too much. These things come when you least
expect them.”
But he never ceased to worry. He no longer simply lived. He had begun to wait, not only for
love, but for the world to yield its sweetness and romance. He deferred all his pleasure in life until
that day. And it was in this mood of expectation that he went to Hanuman House at Arwacas, and
saw Shama.
3. The Tulsis
Among the tumbledown timber– and-corrugated-iron buildings in the High Street at Arwacas,
Hanuman House stood like an alien white fortress. The concrete walls looked as thick as they were,
and when the narrow doors of the Tulsi Store on the ground floor were closed the House became
bulky, impregnable and blank. The side walls were windowless, and on the upper two floors the
windows were mere slits in the fa ade. The balustrade which hedged the flat roof was crowned with
a concrete statue of the benevolent monkey-god Hanuman. From the ground his whitewashed
features could scarcely be distinguished and were, if anything, slightly sinister, for dust had settled
on projections and the effect was that of a face lit up from below.
The Tulsis had some reputation among Hindus as a pious, conservative, landowning family.
Other communities, who knew nothing of the Tulsis, had heard about Pundit Tulsi, the founder of
the family. He had been one of the first to be killed in a motorcar accident and was the subject of an
irreverent and extremely popular song. To many outsiders he was therefore only a creature of
fiction. Among Hindus there were other rumours about Pundit Tulsi, some romantic, some
scurrilous. The fortune he had made in Trinidad had not come from labouring and it remained a
mystery why he had emigrated as a labourer. One or two emigrants, from criminal clans, had come
to escape the law. One or two had come to escape the consequences of their families’ participation
in the Mutiny. Pundit Tulsi belonged to neither class. His family still flourished in India–letters
arrived regularly–and it was known that he had been of higher standing than most of the Indians
who had come to Trinidad, nearly all of whom, like Raghu, like Ajodha, had lost touch with their
families and wouldn’t have known in what province to find them. The deference paid Pundit Tulsi
in his native district had followed him to Trinidad and now that he was dead attached to his family.
Little was really known about this family; outsiders were admitted to Hanuman House only for
certain religious celebrations.
Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House to paint signs for the Tulsi Store, after a protracted
interview with a large, moustached, overpowering man called Seth, Mrs. Tulsi’s brother-in-law.
Seth had beaten down Mr. Biswas’s price and said that Mr. Biswas was getting the job only because
he was an Indian; he had beaten it down a little further and said that Mr. Biswas could count himself
lucky to be a Hindu; he had beaten it down yet further and said that signs were not really needed but
were being commissioned from Mr. Biswas only because he was a Brahmin.
The Tulsi Store was disappointing. The fa ade that promised such an amplitude of space
concealed a building which was trapezoid in plan and not deep. There were no windows and light
came only from the two narrow doors at the front and the single door at the back, which opened on
to a covered courtyard. The walls, of uneven thickness, curved here and jutted there, and the shop
abounded in awkward, empty, cobwebbed corners. Awkward, too, were the thick ugly columns,
whose number dismayed Mr. Biswas because he had undertaken, among other things, to paint signs
on all of them.
He began by decorating the top of the back wall with an enormous sign. This he illustrated
meaninglessly with a drawing of Punch, who appeared incongruously gay and roguish in the austere
shop where goods were stored rather than displayed and the assistants were grave and
unenthusiastic.
These assistants, he had learned with surprise, were all members of the House. He could not
therefore let his eyes rove as freely as usual among the unmarried girls. So, as circumspectly as he
could, he studied them while he worked, and decided that the most attractive was a girl of about
sixteen, whom the others called Shama. She was of medium height, slender but firm, with fine
features, and though he disliked her voice, he was enchanted by her smile. So enchanted, that after a
few days he would very much have liked to do the low and possibly dangerous thing of talking to
her. The presence of her sisters and brothers-in-law deterred him, as well as the unpredictable and
forbidding appearances of Seth, dressed more like a plantation overseer than a store manager. Still,
he stared at her with growing frankness. When she found him out he looked away, became very
busy with his brushes and shaped his lips as though he were whistling softly. In fact he couldn’t
whistle; all he did was to expel air almost soundlessly through the lecherous gap in his top teeth.
When she had responded to his stares a few times he felt that a certain communion had been
established between them; and, meeting Alec in Pagotes, where Alec was working in Ajodha’s
garage once again, as a mechanic and a painter of buses and signs, Mr. Biswas said, “I got a girl in
Arwacas.”
Alec was congratulatory. “Like I did say, these things come when you least expect them.
What you was fussing so for?”
And a few days later Bhandat’s eldest boy said, “Mohun, I hear you got a girl at long last,
man.” He was patronizing; it was well known that he was having an affair with a woman of another
race by whom he had already had a child; he was proud both of the child and its illegitimacy.
The news of the girl at Arwacas spread and Mr. Biswas enjoyed some glory at Pagotes until
Bhandat’s younger son, a prognathous, contemptuous boy, said, “I feel you lying like hell, you
know.”
When Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House the next day he had a note in his pocket, which he
intended to give to Shama. She was busy all morning, but just before noon, when the store closed
for lunch, there was a lull and her counter was free. He came down the ladder, whistling in his way.
Unnecessarily, he began stacking and restacking his paint tins. Then, preoccupied and frowning, he
walked about the store, looking for tins that were not there. He passed Shama’s counter and,
without looking at her, placed the note under a bolt of cloth. The note was crumpled and slightly
dirty and looked ineffectual. But she saw it. She looked away and smiled. It was not a smile of
complicity or pleasure; it was a smile that told Mr. Biswas he had made a fool of himself. He felt
exceedingly foolish, and wondered whether he shouldn’t take back his note and abandon Shama at
once.
While he hesitated a fat Negro woman went to Shama’s counter and asked for flesh-coloured
stockings, which were then enjoying some vogue in rural Trinidad.
Shama, still smiling, took down a box and held up a pair of black cotton stockings.
“Eh !” The woman’s gasp could be heard throughout the shop. “You playing with me? How
the hell all-you get so fresh and conceited?” She began to curse. “Playing with me!” She pulled
boxes and bolts of cloth off the counter and hurled them to the floor and every time something
crashed she shouted, “Playing with me!” One of the Tulsi sons-in-law ran up to pacify her. She
cuffed him back. “Where the old lady?” she called, and screamed, “Mai! Mai!” as though in great
pain.
Shama had ceased to smile. Fright was plain on her face. Mr. Biswas had no desire to comfort
her. She looked so much like a child now that he only became more ashamed of the note. The bolt
of cloth which concealed it had been thrown to the ground, and the note was exposed, caught at the
end of the brass yardstick that was screwed to the counter.
He moved towards the counter, but was driven back by the woman’s fat flailing arms.
Then silence fell on the shop. The woman’s arms became still. Through the back doorway, to
the right of the counter, Mrs. Tulsi appeared. She was as laden as Tara with jewellery; she lacked
Tara’s sprightliness but was statelier; her face, though not plump, was slack, as if unexercised.
Mr. Biswas moved back to his tins and brushes.
“Yes, ma’am, I want to see you .” The woman was breathless with anger. “I want to see you .
I want you to beat that child, ma’am. I want you to beat that conceited, rude child of yours.”
“All right, miss. All right.” Mrs. Tulsi pressed her thin lips together repeatedly. “Tell me what
happened.” She spoke English in a slow, precise way which surprised Mr. Biswas and filled him
with apprehension. She was now behind the counter and her fingers which, like her face, were
creased rather than wrinkled, rubbed along the brass yardstick. From time to time, while she
listened, she pressed the corner of her veil over her moving lips.
Mr. Biswas, now busily cleaning brushes, wiping them dry, and putting soap in the bristle to
keep it supple, was sure that Mrs. Tulsi was listening with only half a mind, that her eyes had been
caught by the note: I love you and I want to talk to you .
Mrs. Tulsi spoke some abuse to Shama in Hindi, the obscenity of which startled Mr. Biswas.
The woman looked pacified. Mrs. Tulsi promised to look further into the matter and gave the
woman a pair of flesh-coloured stockings free. The woman began to retell her story. Mrs. Tulsi,
treating the matter as closed, repeated that she was giving the stockings free. The woman went on
unhurriedly to the end of the story. Then she walked slowly out of the shop, muttering,
exaggeratedly swinging her large hips.
The note was in Mrs. Tulsi’s hand. She held it just above the counter, far from her eyes, and
read it, patting her lips with her veil.
“Shama, that was a shameless thing to do.”
“I wasn’t thinking, Mai,” Shama said, and burst into tears, like a girl about to be flogged.
Mr. Biswas’s disenchantment was complete.
Mrs. Tulsi, holding her veil to her chin, nodded absently, still looking at the note.
Mr. Biswas slunk out of the store. He went to Mrs. Seeung’s, a large caf in the High Street,
and ordered a sardine roll and a bottle of aerated water. The sardines were dry, the onion offended
him, and the bread had a crust that cut the inside of his lips. He drew comfort only from the thought
that he had not signed the note and could deny writing it.
When he went back to the store he was determined to pretend that nothing had happened,
determined never to look at Shama again. Carefully he prepared his brushes and set to work. He
was relieved that no one showed an interest in him; and more relieved to find that Shama was not in
the store that afternoon. With a light heart he outlined Punch’s dog on the irregular surface of the
whitewashed column. Below the dog he ruled lines and sketched BARGAINS! BARGAINS! He
painted the dog red, the first BARGAINS! black, the second blue. Moving a rung or two down the
ladder he ruled more lines, and between these lines he detailed some of the bargains the Tulsi Store
offered, in letters which he “cut out”, painting a section of the column red, leaving the letters cut out
in the whitewash. Along the top and bottom of the red strip he left small circles of whitewash; these
he gashed with one red stroke, to give the impression that a huge red plaque had been screwed on to
the pillar; it was one of Alec’s devices. The work absorbed him all afternoon. Shama never
appeared in the store, and for minutes he forgot about the morning’s happenings.
Just before four, when the store closed and Mr. Biswas stopped work, Seth came, looking as
though he had spent the day in the fields. He wore muddy bluchers and a stained khaki topee; in the
pocket of his sweated khaki shirt he carried a black notebook and an ivory cigarette holder. He went
to Mr. Biswas and said, in a tone of gruff authority, “The old lady want to see you before you go.”
Mr. Biswas resented the tone, and was disturbed that Seth had spoken to him in English.
Saying nothing, he came down the ladder and washed out his brushes, doing his soundless whistling
while Seth stood over him. The front doors were bolted and barred and the Tulsi Store became dark
and warm and protected.
He followed Seth through the back door to the damp, gloomy courtyard, where he had never
been. Here the Tulsi Store felt even smaller: looking back he saw lifesize carvings of Hanuman,
grotesquely coloured, on either side of the shop doorway. Across the courtyard there was a large,
old, grey wooden house which he thought must be the original Tulsi house. He had never suspected
its size from the store; and from the road it was almost hidden by the tall concrete building, to
which it was connected by an unpainted, new-looking wooden bridge, which roofed the courtyard.
They climbed a short flight of cracked concrete steps into the hall of the wooden house. It was
deserted. Seth left Mr. Biswas, saying he had to go and wash. It was a spacious hall, smelling of
smoke and old wood. The pale green paint had grown dim and dingy and the timbers revealed the
ravages of woodlice which left wood looking so new where it was rotten. Then Mr. Biswas had
another surprise. Through the doorway at the far end he saw the kitchen. And the kitchen had mud
walls. It was lower than the hall and appeared to be completely without light. The doorway gaped
black; soot stained the wall about it and the ceiling just above; so that blackness seemed to fill the
kitchen like a solid substance.
The most important piece of furniture in the hall was a long unvarnished pitchpine table,
hard-grained and chipped. A hammock made from sugarsacks hung across one corner of the room.
An old sewingmachine, a baby-chair and a black biscuit-drum occupied another corner. Scattered
about were a number of unrelated chairs, stools and benches, one of which, low and carved with
rough ornamentation from a solid block of cyp wood, still had the saffron colour which told that it
had been used at a wedding ceremony. More elegant pieces–a dresser, a desk, a piano so buried
among papers and baskets and other things that it was unlikely it was ever used–choked the
staircase landing. On the other side of the hall there was a loft of curious construction. It was as if
an enormous drawer had been pulled out of the top of the wall; the vacated space, dark and dusty,
was crammed with all sorts of articles Mr. Biswas couldn’t distinguish.
He heard a creak on the staircase and saw a long white skirt and a long white petticoat
dancing above silver-braceleted ankles. It was Mrs. Tulsi. She moved slowly; he knew from her
face that she had spent the afternoon in bed. Without acknowledging his presence she sat on a bench
and, as if already tired, rested her jewelled arms on the table. He saw that in one smooth ringed
hand she was holding the note.
“You wrote this?”
He did his best to look puzzled. He stared hard at the note and stretched a hand to take it. Mrs.
Tulsi pulled the note away and held it up.
“That? I didn’t write that. Why should I want to write that?”
“I only thought so because somebody saw you put it down.”
The silence outside was broken. The tall gate in the corrugated iron fence at the side of the
courtyard banged repeatedly, and the courtyard was filled with the shuffle and chatter of the
children back from school. They passed to the side of the house, under the gallery formed by the
projecting loft. A child was crying; another explained why; a woman shouted for silence. From the
kitchen came sounds of activity. At once the house felt peopled and full.
Seth came back to the hall, his bluchers resounding on the floor. He had washed and was
without his topee; his damp hair, streaked with grey, was combed flat. He sat down across the table
from Mrs. Tulsi and fitted a cigarette into his cigarette holder.
“What?” Mr. Biswas said. “Somebody saw me put that down?”
Seth laughed. “Nothing to be ashamed about.” He clenched his lips over the cigarette holder
and opened the corners of his mouth to laugh.
Mr. Biswas was puzzled. It would have been more understandable if they had taken his word
and asked him never to come to their house again.
“I believe I know your family,” Seth said.
In the gallery outside and in the kitchen there was now a continual commotion. A woman
came out of the black doorway with a brass plate and a blue-rimmed enamel cup. She set them
before Mrs. Tulsi and, without a word, without looking right or left, hurried back to the blackness of
the kitchen. The cup contained milky tea, the plate roti and curried beans. Another woman brought
similar food in an equally reverential way to Seth. Mr. Biswas recognized both women as Shama’s
sisters; their dress and manner showed that they were married.
Mrs. Tulsi, scooping up some beans with a shovel of roti , said to Seth, “Better feed him?”
“Do you want to eat?” Seth spoke as though it would have been amusing if Mr. Biswas did
want to eat.
Mr. Biswas disliked what he saw and shook his head.
“Pull up that chair and sit here,” Mrs. Tulsi said and, barely raising her voice, called, “C,
bring a cup of tea for this person.”
“I know your family,” Seth repeated. “Who’s your father again?”
Mr. Biswas evaded the question. “I am the nephew of Ajodha. Pagotes.”
“Of course.” Expertly Seth ejected the cigarette from the holder to the floor and ground it with
his bluchers, hissing smoke down from his nostrils and up from his mouth. “I know Ajodha. Sold
him some land. Dhanku’s land,” he said, turning to Mrs. Tulsi.
“O yes.” Mrs. Tulsi continued to eat, lifting her armoured hand high above her plate.
C turned out to be the woman who had served Mrs. Tulsi. She resembled Shama but was
shorter and sturdier and her features were less fine. Her veil was pulled decorously over her
forehead, but when she brought Mr. Biswas his cup of tea she gave him a frank, unimpressed stare.
He attempted to glare back but was too slow; she had already turned and was walking away briskly
on light bare feet. He put the tall cup to his lips and took a slow, noisy draught, studying his
reflection in the tea and wondering about Seth’s position in the family.
He put the cup down when he heard someone else come into the hall. This was a tall, slender,
smiling man dressed in white. His face was sunburnt and his hands were rough. Breathlessly, with
many sighs, laughs and swallows, he reported to Seth on various animals. He seemed anxious to
appear tired and anxious to please. Seth looked pleased. C came from the kitchen again and
followed the man upstairs; he was obviously her husband.
Mr. Biswas took another draught of tea, studied his reflection and wondered whether every
couple had a room to themselves; he also wondered what sleeping arrangements were made for the
children he heard shouting and squealing and being slapped (by mothers alone?) in the gallery
outside, the children he saw peeping at him from the kitchen doorway before being dragged away
by ringed hands.
“So you really do like the child?”
It was a moment or so before Mr. Biswas, behind his cup, realized that Mrs. Tulsi had
addressed the question to him, and another moment before he knew who the child was.
He felt it would be graceless to say no. “Yes,” he said, “I like the child.”
Mrs. Tulsi chewed and said nothing.
Seth said: “I know Ajodha. You want me to go and see him?”
Incomprehension, surprise, then panic, overwhelmed Mr. Biswas. The child,” he said
desperately. “What about the child?”
“What about her?” Seth said. “She is a good child. A little bit of reading and writing even.”
“A little bit of reading and writing–” Mr. Biswas echoed, trying to gain time.
Seth, chewing, his right hand working dexterously with roti and beans, made a dismissing
gesture with his left hand. “Just a little bit. So much. Nothing to worry about. In two or three years
she might even forget.” And he gave a little laugh. He wore false teeth which clacked every time he
chewed.
“The child–” Mr. Biswas said.
Mrs. Tulsi stared at him.
“I mean,” said Mr. Biswas, “the child knows?”
“Nothing at all,” Seth said appeasingly.
“I mean,” said Mr. Biswas, “does the child like me?”
Mrs. Tulsi looked as though she couldn’t understand. Chewing, with lingering squelchy
sounds, she raised Mr. Biswas’s note with her free hand and said, “What’s the matter? You don’t
like the child?”
“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said helplessly. “I like the child.”
“That is the main thing,” Seth said. “We don’t want to force you to do anything. Are we
forcing you?”
Mr. Biswas remained silent.
Seth gave another disparaging little laugh and poured tea into his mouth, holding the cup
away from his lips, chewing and clacking between pours. “Eh, boy, are we forcing you?”
“No,” Mr. Biswas said. “You are not forcing me.”
“All right, then. What’s upsetting you?”
Mrs. Tulsi smiled at Mr. Biswas. “The poor boy is shy. I know.”
“I am not shy and I am not upset,” Mr. Biswas said, and the aggression in his voice so
startled him that he continued softly, “It’s only that–well, it’s only that I have no money to start
thinking about getting married.”
Mrs. Tulsi became as stern as he had seen her in the store that morning. “Why did you write
this then?” She waved the note.
“Ach! Don’t worry with him,” Seth said. “No money! Ajodha’s family, and no money!”
Mr. Biswas thought it would be useless to explain.
Mrs. Tulsi became calmer. “If your father was worried about money, he wouldn’t have
married at all.”
Seth nodded solemnly.
Mr. Biswas was puzzled by her use of the words “your father”. At first he had thought she
was speaking to Seth alone, but then he saw that the statement had wider, alarming implications.
Faces of children and women peeped out from the kitchen doorway.
The world was too small, the Tulsi family too large. He felt trapped.
How often, in the years to come, at Hanuman House or in the house at Shorthills or in the
house in Port of Spain, living in one room, with some of his children sleeping on the next bed, and
Shama, the prankster, the server of black cotton stockings, sleeping downstairs with the other
children, how often did Mr. Biswas regret his weakness, his inarticulateness, that evening! How
often did he try to make events appear grander, more planned and less absurd than they were!
And the most absurd feature of that evening was to come. When he had left Hanuman House
and was cycling back to Pagotes, he actually felt elated! In the large, musty hall with the sooty
kitchen at one end, the furniture-choked landing on one side, and the dark, cobwebbed loft on the
other, he had been overpowered and frightened by Seth and Mrs. Tulsi and all the Tulsi women and
children; they were strange and had appeared too strong; he wanted nothing so much then as to be
free of that house. But now the elation he felt was not that of relief. He felt he had been involved in
large events. He felt he had achieved status.
His way lay along the County Road and the Eastern Main Road. Both were lined for stretches
with houses that were ambitious, incomplete, unpainted, often skeletal, with wooden frames that
had grown grey and mildewed while their owners lived in one or two imperfectly enclosed rooms.
Through unfinished partitions, patched up with box-boards, tin and canvas, the family clothing
could be seen hanging on lengths of string stretched across the inhabited rooms like bunting; no
beds were to be seen, only a table and chair perhaps, and many boxes. Twice a day he cycled past
these houses, but that evening he saw them as for the first time. From such failure, which until only
that morning awaited him, he had by one stroke made himself exempt.
And when that evening Alec asked in his friendly mocking way, “How the girl, man?” Mr.
Biswas said happily, “Well, I see the mother.”
Alec was stupefied. “The mother? But what the hell you gone and put yourself in?”
All Mr. Biswas’s dread returned, but he said, “Is all right. I got my eyes open. Good family,
you know. Money. Acres and acres of land. No more sign-painting for me.”
Alec didn’t look reassured. “How you manage this so quick?”
“Well, I see this girl, you know. I see this girl and she was looking at me, and I was looking at
she. So I give she a little of the old sweet talk and I see that she was liking me too. And, well, to cut
a long story short, I ask to see the mother. Rich people, you know. Big house.”
But he was worried, and spent much time that evening wondering whether he should go back
to Hanuman House. He began feeling that it was he who had acted, and was unwilling to believe
that he had acted foolishly. And, after all, the girl was good-looking. And there would be a
handsome dowry. Against this he could set only his fear, and a regret he could explain to no one: he
would be losing romance forever, since there could be no romance at Hanuman House.
In the morning everything seemed so ordinary that both his fear and regret became unreal, and
he saw no reason why he should behave unusually.
He went back to the Tulsi Store and painted a column.
He was invited to lunch in the hall, off lentils, spinach and a mound of rice on a brass plate.
Flies buzzed on fresh food-stains all along the pitchpine table. He disliked the food and disliked
eating off brass plates. Mrs. Tulsi, who was not eating herself, sat next to him, stared at his plate,
brushed the flies away from it with one hand, and talked.
At one stage she directed his attention to a framed photograph on the wall below the loft. The
photograph, blurred at the edges and in many other places, was of a moustached man in turban,
jacket and dhoti, with beads around his neck, caste-marks on his forehead and an unfurled umbrella
on the crook of his left arm. It was Pundit Tulsi.
“We never had a quarrel,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Suppose I wanted to go to Port of Spain, and he
didn’t. You think we’d quarrel about a thing like that? No. We would sit down and talk it over, and
he would say, ‘All right, let us go.’ Or I would say, ‘All right, we won’t go.’ That’s the way we
were, you know.”
She had grown almost maudlin, and Mr. Biswas was trying to appear solemn while chewing.
He chewed slowly and wondered whether he shouldn’t stop altogether; but whenever he stopped
eating Mrs. Tulsi stopped talking.
“This house,” Mrs. Tulsi said, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes with her veil and waving a
hand in a fatigued way, “this house–he built it with his own hands. Those walls aren’t concrete, you
know. Did you know that?”
Mr. Biswas went on eating.
“They looked like concrete to you, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they looked like concrete.”
“It looks like concrete to everybody . But everybody is wrong. Those walls are really made of
clay bricks. Clay bricks,” she repeated, staring at Mr. Biswas’s plate and waiting for him to say
something.
“Clay bricks!” he said. “I would never have thought that.”
“Clay bricks. And he made every brick himself. Right here. In Ceylon.”
“Ceylon?”
“That is how we call the yard at the back. You haven’t seen it? Nice piece of ground. Lots of
flower trees. He was a great one for flowers, you know. We still have the brick-factory and
everything there as well. There’s a lot of people don’t know about this house. Ceylon. You’d better
start getting to know these names.” She laughed and Mr. Biswas felt a little stab of fear. “And
then,” she went on, “he was going to Port of Spain one day, to make arrangements to take us all
back to India. Just for a trip, you know. And this car came and knocked him down, and he died,
Died,” she repeated, and waited.
Mr. Biswas swallowed hurriedly and said, “That must have been a blow.”
“It was a blow. Only one daughter married. Two sons to educate. It was a blow. And we had
no money, you know.”
This was news to Mr. Biswas. He hid his perturbation by looking down at his brass plate and
chewing hard.
“And Seth says, and I agree with him, that with the father dead, one shouldn’t make too much
fuss about marrying people off. You know”–she lifted her heavy braceleted arms and made a
clumsy dancer’s gesture which amused her a good deal–“drums and dancing and big dowry. We
don’t believe in that. We leave that to people who want to show off. You know the sort of people.
Dressed up to kill all the time. Yet go and see where they come out from. You know those houses in
the County Road. Half built. No furniture. No, we are not like that. Then, all this fuss about getting
married was more suitable for oldfashioned people like myself. Not for you. Do you think it matters
how people get married?”
“Not really.”
“You remind me a little of him .”
He followed her gaze to other photographs of Pundit Tulsi on the wall. There was one of him
flanked by potted palms against the sunset of a photographer’s studio. In another photograph he
stood, a small indistinct figure, under the arcade of Hanuman House, beyond the High Street that
was empty except for a broken barrel which, because it was nearer the camera, stood out in clear
detail. (How did they empty the street, Mr. Biswas wondered. Perhaps it was a Sunday morning, or
perhaps they had roped the populace off.) There was another photograph of him behind the
balustrade. In every photograph he carried the unfurled umbrella.
“He would have liked you,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “He would have been proud to know that you
were going to marry one of his daughters. He wouldn’t have let things like your job or your money
worry him. He always said that the only thing that mattered was the blood. I can just look at you
and see that you come from good blood. A simple little ceremony at the registrar’s office is all that
you need.”
And Mr. Biswas found that he had agreed.
At Hanuman House everything had appeared simple and reasonable. Outside, he was stunned.
He had not had time to think about the problems marriage would bring. Now they seemed
enormous. What would happen to his mother? Where would he live? He had no money and no job,
for sign-writing, while good enough for a boy living with his mother, was hardly a secure
profession for a married man. To get a house he would first have to get a job. He needed much time,
but the Tulsis were giving him none at all, though they knew his circumstances. He assumed that
they had decided to give more than a dowry, that they would help with a job or a house, or both. He
would have liked to talk things over with Seth and Mrs. Tulsi; but they had become unapproachable
as soon as notice had been given at the registrar’s.
There was no one in Pagotes he could talk to, for pure shame had kept him from telling Tara
or Bipti or Alec that he was going to be married. At Hanuman House, in the press of daughters,
sons-in-law and children, he began to feel lost, unimportant and even frightened. No one
particularly noticed him. Sometimes, during the general feeding, he might be included; but as yet he
had no wife to single him out for attention, to do the little services he saw Shama’s sisters doing for
their husbands: the ready ladle, the queries, the formal concern. Shama he seldom saw, and when he
did, she ostentatiously ignored him.
It never occurred to him that he might withdraw. He felt he had committed himself in every
legal and moral way. And, telling Bipti one morning that he would be away for a short time on a
job, he took some of his clothes and moved to Hanuman House. It was only half a lie: he could not
believe that the events he was taking part in had any solidity, and could change him in any way. The
days were too ordinary for that; nothing unusual could befall him. And shortly, he knew, he would
return, unchanged, to the back trace. As a guarantee of that return, he left most of his clothes and all
of his books in the hut; it was partly, too, to guarantee this return that he lied to Bipti.
After a brief ceremony at the registrar’s, as make-believe as a child’s game, with paper
flowers in dissimilar vases on a straw-coloured, official-looking desk, Mr. Biswas and Shama were
given part of a long room on the top floor of the wooden house.
And now he became cautious. Now he thought of escape. To leave the way clear for that he
thought it important to avoid the final commitment. He didn’t embrace or touch her. He wouldn’t
have known, besides, how to begin, with someone who had not spoken a word to him, and whom he
still saw with the mocking smile she had given that morning in the store. Not wishing to be tempted,
he didn’t look at her, and was relieved when she left the room. He spent the rest of that day
imprisoned where he was, listening to the noises of the house.
Neither on that day nor on the following days did anyone speak to him of dowry, house or
job; and he realized that there had been no discussions because Mrs. Tulsi and Seth didn’t see that
there were any problems to discuss. The organization of the Tulsi house was simple. Mrs. Tulsi had
only one servant, a Negro woman who was called Blackie by Seth and Mrs. Tulsi, and Miss Blackie
by everyone else. Miss Blackie’s duties were vague. The daughters and their children swept and
washed and cooked and served in the store. The husbands, under Seth’s supervision, worked on the
Tulsi land, looked after the Tulsi animals, and served in the store. In return they were given food,
shelter and a little money; their children were looked after; and they were treated with respect by
people outside because they were connected with the Tulsi family. Their names were forgotten;
they became Tulsis. There were daughters who had, in the Tulsi marriage lottery, drawn husbands
with money and position; these daughters followed the Hindu custom of living with their husband’s
families, and formed no part of the Tulsi organization.
Up to this time Mr. Biswas thought he had been especially favoured by the Tulsis. But when
he came to see how the family disposed of its daughters, he wondered that Seth and Mrs. Tulsi had
gone to such trouble on two consecutive days to make marriage attractive to him. They had married
Shama to him simply because he was of the proper caste, just as they had married the daughter
called.C to an illiterate coconut-seller.
Mr. Biswas had no money or position. He was expected to become a Tulsi.
At once he rebelled.
Pretending not to know what was expected of him, he finished the signs for the Tulsi Store
and decided that the time had come to escape, with Shama or without her. It looked as though it
would have to be without her. They still had not spoken; and, following his policy of caution, he
had not attempted to establish any relations with her in the long room. He was convinced that she
was a thorough Tulsi. And he was glad of his caution when she took to crying openly in the hall,
surrounded by sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, saying that Mr. Biswas had been
married less than a fortnight but was already doing his best to break her heart and create trouble in
the family.
In a tremendous temper Mr. Biswas began packing his brushes and clothes.
“Yes, take up your clothes and go,” Shama said. “You came to this house with nothing but a
pair of cheap khaki trousers and a dirty old shirt.”
He left Hanuman House and went back to Pagotes.
He felt unchanged, unmarried. He had simply had a good fright, but had managed things well
and escaped.
In Pagotes, however, he found that his marriage was not a secret. Bipti welcomed him with
tears of joy. She said she had always known that he wouldn’t let her down. She had never said it,
but she had always felt he would marry into a good family. She could now die happily. If she lived
she had something to brighten her old age. Mr. Biswas must not reproach himself for his secrecy; he
was not to worry about her at all; he had his own life to live.
And despite his protests she put on her best clothes and went to Arwacas the next day. She
came back overwhelmed by the graciousness of Mrs. Tulsi, the diffidence of Shama and the
splendour of Hanuman House.
She described a house he hardly knew. She spoke of a drawingroom with two tall thronelike
mahogany chairs, potted palms and ferns in huge brass vases on marble topped tables, religious
paintings, and many pieces of Hindu sculpture. She spoke of a prayer-room above that, which, with
its slender columns, was like a temple: a low, cool, white room, empty except for the shrine in the
centre.
She had seen only the upper floors of the concrete or rather, clay-brick, building. He didn’t
tell her that that part of the house was reserved for visitors, Mrs. Tulsi, Seth and Mrs. Tulsi’s two
younger sons. And he thought it better to keep silent about the old wooden house which the family
called “the old barracks”.
He spent two days in hiding at the back trace, not caring to face Alec or Bhandat’s boys. On
the third day he felt the need of greater comfort than Bipti could give, and that evening he went to
Tara’s. He entered by the side gate. From the cowpen came a familiar early evening sound: the
unhurried stir and rustle of cows in stalls laid with fresh straw. The back verandah outside Tara’s
kitchen was warm with light. He heard the steady drone of someone reading aloud.
He found Ajodha rocking slowly, his head thrown back, frowning, his eyes closed, his eyelids
palpitating with anguish while Bhandat’s younger boy read That Body of Yours .
Bhandat’s boy stopped reading when he saw Mr. Biswas. His eyes became bright with
amusement and his prognathous smile was a sneer.
Ajodha opened his eyes and gave a shriek of malicious delight. “Married man!” he cried in
English. “Married man!”
Mr. Biswas smiled and looked sheepish.
“Tara, Tara,” Ajodha called. “Come and look at your married nephew.”
She came out gravely from the kitchen, embraced Mr. Biswas and wept for so long that he
began to feel, with sadness and a deep sense of loss, that he really was married, that in some
irrevocable way he had changed. She undid the knot at the end of her veil and took out a
twenty-dollar note. He objected for a little, then took it.
“Married man!” Ajodha cried again.
Tara took Mr. Biswas to the kitchen and gave him a meal. And while, in the verandah,
Bhandat’s boy continued to read That Body of Yours , with the moths striking continually against
the glass chimney of the oil lamp, she and Mr. Biswas talked. She could not keep the unhappiness
and disappointment out of her face and voice, and this encouraged him to be bitter about the Tulsis.
“And what sort of dowry did they give you?” she asked.
“Dowry? They are not so oldfashioned. They didn’t give me a penny.”
“Registry?”
He bit at a slice of pickled mango and nodded.
“It is a modern custom,” Tara said. “And like most modern customs, very economical.”
“They didn’t even pay me for the signs.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Yes,” he lied. “But you don’t know those people.” He would have been ashamed to explain
the organization of the Tulsi house, and to say that his signs were probably considered contributions
to the family endeavour.
“You just leave this to me,” Tara said.
His heart sank. He had wanted her to declare that he was free, that he needn’t go back, that he
could forget the Tulsis and Shama.
And he was no happier when she went to Hanuman House and came back with what she said
was good news. He was not to live at Hanuman House forever; the Tulsis had decided to set him up
as soon as possible in a shop in a village called The Chase.
He was married. Nothing now, except death, could change that.
“They told me that they only wanted to help you out,” Tara said. “They said you didn’t want
any dowry or big wedding and they didn’t offer because it was a love match.” Reproach was in her
voice.
“Love match!” Ajodha cried. “Rabidat, listen to that.” He punched Bhandat’s younger boy in
the belly. “Love match!”
Rabidat gave his contemptuous smile.
Mr. Biswas looked angrily and accusingly at Rabidat. He held Rabidat, more than anyone
else, responsible for his marriage and wanted to say it was Rabidat’s taunt which had made him
write that note to Shama. Instead, ignoring Ajodha’s chuckles and shrieks, he said, “Love match?
What love match? They are lying.”
In a disappointed, tired way Tara said, “They showed me a love letter.” She used the English
word; it sounded vicious.
Ajodha shrieked again. “Love letter! Mohun!”
Bhandat’s boy continued to smile.
Their mood seemed to infect Tara. “Mrs. Tulsi told me that she believed you wanted to go on
with your sign-writing and that Hanuman House was the best place to work from.” She had begun
to smile. “Everything’s all right now, boy. You can go back to your wife.”
The stress she gave to the word “wife” wounded Mr. Biswas.
“You have got yourself into a real gum-pot,” she added, more sympathetically. “And I had
such nice plans for you.”
“I wish you had told me,” he said, without irony.
“Go back and get your wife!” Ajodha said.
He paid no attention to Ajodha and asked Tara in English, “You like she?” Hindi was too
intimate and tender.
Tara shrugged, to say that it was none of her business; and this hurt Mr. Biswas, for it
emphasized his loneliness: Tara’s interest in Shama might have made everything more bearable. He
thought he would show an equal unconcern. Lightly, smiling back at Ajodha, he asked Tara, “I
suppose they vex with me now over there, eh?”
His tone angered her. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of them already, like every other
man in that place?”
“Afraid? No. You don’t know me.”
But it was some days before he could make up his mind to go back. He didn’t know what his
rights were, didn’t believe in the shop at The Chase, and his plans were vague. Only, he doubted
that he would return to the back trace, and when he packed, he packed everything, Bipti crying
happily all the while. As he cycled past the unfinished, open houses on the County Road, he
wondered how many nights he would spend behind the closed facade of Hanuman House.
“What?” Shama said in English. “You come back already? You tired catching crab in
Pagotes?”
Despite the adventurousness and danger of his calling, the crab-catcher was considered the
lowest of the low.
“I thought I would come and help all-you catch some here,” Mr. Biswas replied, and killed the
giggles in the hall.
No other comment was made. He had expected to be met by silence, stares, hostility and
perhaps a little fear. He got the stares; the noise continued; the fear was, of course, only a wild
hope; and he couldn’t be sure of the hostility. The interest in his return was momentary and
superficial. No one referred to his absence or return, not Seth, not Mrs. Tulsi, both of whom
continued, as they had done even before he left, hardly to notice him. He heard nothing about the
visits of Bipti and Tara. The house was too full, too busy; such events were insignificant because he
mattered little to the house. His status there was now fixed. He was troublesome and disloyal, and
could not be trusted. He was weak and therefore contemptible.
He had not expected to hear any more about the shop in The Chase. And he didn’t. He began
to doubt that it existed. He went on with his sign-writing and spent as much time as he could out of
the house. But he was unknown in Arwacas and jobs were scarce. Time hung heavily on his hands
until he met an equally underemployed man called Misir, the Arwacas correspondent of the
Trinidad Sentinel . They discussed jobs, Hinduism, India and their respective families.
Every afternoon Mr. Biswas had to prepare afresh for his return to Hanuman House, though
once he had pushed open the tall gate at the side it was a short journey, across the courtyard,
through the hall, up the steps, along the verandah, through the Book Room, to his share of the long
room. There he stripped to pants and vest, lay down on his bedding and read, leaning on one elbow.
His pants, made by Bipti from floursacks, were unfortunate. Despite many washings they were still
bright with letters and even whole words; they went down to his knees and made him look smaller
than he was. It was not long before the children got to know about these pants, but Mr. Biswas,
refusing to yield to laughter, comments from the hall and Shama’s pleas, continued to parade them.
It was impossible to keep anything secret from the children. As soon as darkness fell beds
were made for them in the Book Room and all along the verandah upstairs. As the evening wore on,
more and more beds were unrolled and the old upstairs became choked with sleepers; sleepers filled
the wooden bridge that connected the old upstairs with the concrete house. Beyond the bridge,
called “the new room”, lay the seclusion and space of the drawingroom that had impressed Bipti.
But even if that part of the house was not reserved for Seth, Mrs. Tulsi and her two sons, Mr.
Biswas would not have cared to go there. It was a forbidding room, with its large brass pots and
marble topped tables. There was nothing to sit on apart from the two chairs which Bipti had
described as thronelike. And the room was made oppressive by the many statues of Hindu gods,
heavy and ugly, which Pundit Tulsi had brought back from his Indian visits. “He must have bought
them wholesale from some godshop,” Mr. Biswas told Shama later. Above that was the greater
seclusion of the prayer-room, reached from the drawingroom by a staircase as steep as a ship’s
companionway (a means of testing the faithful, or it might simply have been that Pundit Tulsi, like
most builders in the island, got ideas as he went along). But in the prayer-room there was no
furniture at all, the ground was of course sacred, and he found the smell of incense and sandalwood
insupportable.
So, besieged by sleepers, he remained in the long room. His share of it was short and narrow:
the long room, originally a verandah, had been enclosed and split up into bedrooms. He had Shama
bring up his food there and he ate, squatting on his pants-clad haunches, his left hand squashed
between his calf and the back of his thigh. At these times Shama was not the Shama he saw
downstairs, the thorough Tulsi, the antagonist the family had assigned him. In many subtle ways,
but mainly by her silence, she showed that Mr. Biswas, however grotesque, was hers and that she
had to make do with what Fate had granted her. But there was as yet little friendliness between
them. They spoke in English. She seldom asked about his work and he was cautious about revealing
information which might later be used against him, although shame alone might have kept him from
telling her what he earned.
And it was at these eating sessions that Mr. Biswas took his revenge on the Tulsis.
“How the little gods getting on today, eh?” he would ask.
He meant her brothers. The elder attended the Roman Catholic college in Port of Spain and
came home every week-end; the younger was being coached to enter the college. At Hanuman
House they were kept separate from the turbulence of the old upstairs. They worked in the
drawing-room and slept in one of the bedrooms off it; these bedrooms were small and badly lighted,
but their walls felt thick and their very gloom suggested richness and security. The brothers often
did the puja in the prayer-room. Despite their age they were admitted into the councils of Seth and
Mrs. Tulsi and their views were quoted with respect by sisters and brothers-in-law. To assist their
scholarship, the best of the food was automatically set aside for them and they were given special
brain-feeding meals, of fish in particular. When the brothers made public appearances they were
always grave, and sometimes stern. Occasionally they served in the store, sitting near the cashbox,
with open textbooks before them.
“How the gods, eh?”
Shama wouldn’t reply.
“And how the Big Boss getting on today?” That was Seth.
Shama wouldn’t reply.
“And how the old queen?” That was Mrs. Tulsi. “The old hen? The old cow?”
“Well, nobody didn’t ask you to get married into the family, you know.”
“Family? Family? This blasted fowlrun you calling family?”
And with that Mr. Biswas took his brass jar and went to the Demerara window, where he
gargled loudly, indulging at the same time in vile abuse of the family, knowing that the gargling
distorted his words. Then he spat the water down venomously to the yard below.
“Careful, man. The kitchen just down there.”
“I know that. I just hoping I spit on some of your family.”
“Well, you should be glad that nobody would bother to spit on yours.”
It was a strain, living in a house full of people and talking to one person alone, and after some
weeks Mr. Biswas decided to look around for alliances. Relationships at Hanuman House were
complex and as yet he understood only a few, but he had noted that two friendly sisters made two
friendly husbands, and two friendly husbands made two friendly sisters. Friendly sisters exchanged
stories of their husbands’ disabilities, the names of illnesses and remedies forcing such discussions
to be in English.
“He got one backache these days.”
“You must use hartshorn. He did have backache too. He try Dodd’s Kidney Pills and
Beecham’s and Carter’s Little Liver Pills and a hundred and one other little pills. But hartshorn did
cure him.”
“He don’t like hartshorn. He prefer Sloan’s Liniment and Canadian Healing Oil.”
“And he don’t like Sloan’s Liniment.”
Friendly sisters sealed their friendship by being frank about the other’s children and even by
flogging them on occasion. When the flogged child, unaware of the relationship between the
mothers, complained, his mother would say, “Serve you right. I am glad your aunt is laying her
hand on you. She will keep you straight.” And the mother of the beaten child would wait her turn to
do some beating among the other’s children.
Between Shama and C there was a noticeable friendship and Mr. Biswas decided to make
overtures to C’s husband, the former coconut-seller, whose name was Govind. He was tall and
well-built and handsome, though in a conventional, unremarkable way. Mr. Biswas thought it
unseemly that someone so well-made should have been a coconut-seller, and should now do manual
work in the fields. And Mr. Biswas was pained to see Govind in the presence of Seth. His
handsome face became weak in every way. His eyes became small and bright and restless; he
stammered and swallowed and gave nervous little laughs. And afterwards, when, released, he sat
down at the long pitchpine table to eat, he changed again. Talking loudly and breathlessly, snorting
and sighing, he assaulted his food, as though anxious to show enthusiasm even in that activity,
anxious to prove that hard work had given him an indiscriminate appetite, and anxious at the same
time to proclaim that food didn’t matter to him.
Mr. Biswas thought of Govind as a fellow sufferer, but one who had surrendered to the Tulsis
and been degraded. He had forgotten his own reputation as a buffoon and troublemaker, however,
and found Govind wary of his approaches. On a few evenings Govind suffered himself to be led
outside by Mr. Biswas. Sitting under the arcade, nervously swinging his long legs and smiling,
sucking his teeth and exploring them with his jagged, dirt-stained fingernails, Govind didn’t appear
at ease. There was little to talk about. Women, of course, could not be discussed, and Govind didn’t
wish to discuss India or Hinduism. So Mr. Biswas could talk only of the Tulsis. He asked what it
was like to work under Seth. Govind said it was all right. He asked what Govind thought of Mrs.
Tulsi. She was all right. Her two sons were all right. Everybody was all right. So Mr. Biswas talked
of jobs. Govind showed a little more interest.
“You should give up that sign-painting,” he said one evening, and Mr. Biswas was surprised
and even slightly annoyed that Govind, of all people, should offer him advice, and so positively.
“They looking for good drivers on the estate,” Govind said.
“Give up sign-painting? And my independence? No, boy. My motto is: paddle your own
canoe.” Mr. Biswas began to quote from the poem in Bell’s Standard Elocutionist .
“What about you? How much they paying you?”
“They paying me enough.”
“So you say. But those people are bloodsuckers, man. Rather than work for them, I would
catch crab or sell coconut.”
At the mention of his former profession Govind gave a nervous laugh and swung his legs
agitatedly.
“You wouldn’t see the little gods in the field, I bet.”
“Lil gods?”
Mr. Biswas explained. He explained a lot more. Govind, smiling, sucking his teeth and
laughing from time to time, didn’t say anything.
Late one afternoon Shama came up with food for Mr. Biswas and said, “Uncle want to see
you.” Uncle was Seth.
“Uncle want to see me? Man, go back and tell Uncle that if he want to see me, he must come
up here.”
Shama grew serious. “What you been doing and saying? You getting everybody against you.
You don’t mind. But what about me? You can’t give me anything and you want to prevent
everybody else from doing anything for me. Is all right for you to say that you going to pack up and
leave. But you know that is only talk. What you got?”
“I ain’t got a damned thing. But I not going down to see Uncle. I not at his beck and call, like
everybody else in this house.”
“Go down and tell him so yourself. You talking like a man, go down and behave like one.”
“I not going down.”
Shama cried, and in the end Mr. Biswas put on his trousers. As he went down the stairs his
courage began to leave him, and he had to tell himself that he was a free man and could leave the
house whenever he wished. In the hall, to his shame, he heard himself saying, “Yes, Uncle?”
Seth was fixing a cigarette in his long ivory holder, an exquisiteness which no longer seemed
an affectation to Mr. Biswas. It no longer contrasted with his rough estate clothes and rough,
unshaved, moustached face; it had become part of his appearance. Mr. Biswas, concentrating on the
delicate activity of Seth’s thick, bruised fingers, could feel that the hall was full. But no one was
raising his voice; the whispers, the sounds of eating, the muted and seemingly distant scuffles,
amounted to silence.
“Mohun,” Seth said at last, “how long you been living here?”
“Two months, Uncle.” And he couldn’t help noticing how much he sounded like Govind.
Mrs. Tulsi was there, sitting on a bench at the long table. Unusually, the two gods, unsmiling
boys, were there, sitting together in the sugarsack hammock, their feet on the floor. Sisters were
feeding husbands at the other end of the table. Sisters and their children were thick about the black
entrance to the kitchen.
“You been eating well?”
In Seth’s presence Mr. Biswas felt diminished. Everything about Seth was overpowering: his
calm manner, his smooth grey hair, his ivory holder, his hard swollen forearms: after he spoke he
stroked them, and looked at the hairs springing back into their original posture.
“Eating well?” Mr. Biswas thought about the miserable meals, the risings of his belly, the
cravings which were seldom satisfied. “Yes. I been eating well.”
“You know who provide all the food you been eating?”
Mr. Biswas didn’t answer.
Seth laughed, took the cigarette holder out of his mouth and coughed, from a deep chest.
“This is a helluva man. When a man is married he shouldn’t expect other people to feed him. In
fact, he should be feeding his wife. When I got married you think I did want Mai mother to feed
me?”
Mrs. Tulsi rubbed her braceleted arms on the pitchpine table and shook her head.
The gods were grave.
“And yet I hear that you not happy here.”
“I didn’t tell anybody anything about not being happy here.”
“I is the Big Boss, eh? And Mai is the old queen and the old hen. And these boys is the two
gods, eh?”
The gods became stern.
Looking away from Seth, and causing a dozen or more faces instantly to turn away, Mr.
Biswas saw Govind among eaters at the far end of the table, going at his food in his smiling savage
way, apparently indifferent to the inquisition, while C, bowed and veiled, stood dutifully over him.
“Eh?” For the first time there was impatience in Seth’s voice, and, to show his displeasure, he
began talking Hindi. “This is gratitude. You come here, penniless, a stranger. We take you in, we
give you one of our daughters, we feed you, we give you a place to sleep in. You refuse to help in
the store, you refuse to help on the estate. All right. But then to turn around and insult us!”
Mr. Biswas had never thought of it like that. He said, “I sorry.”
Mrs. Tulsi said, “How can anyone be sorry for something he thinks ?”
Seth pointed to the eaters at the end of the table. “What names have you given to those, eh?”
The eaters, not looking up, ate with greater concentration.
Mr. Biswas said nothing.
“Oh, you haven’t given them names. It’s only to me and Mai and the two boys that you have
given names?”
“I sorry.”
Mrs. Tulsi said, “How can anyone be sorry–”
Seth interrupted her. “So we want someone to work on the estate. Is nice to keep these things
in the family. And what you say? You want to paddle your own canoe. Look at him!” Seth said to
the hall. “Biswas the paddler.”
The children smiled; the sisters pulled their veils over their foreheads; their husbands ate and
frowned; the gods in the hammock, rocking very slowly with their feet on the floor, glowered at the
staircase landing.
“It runs in the family,” Seth said. “They tell me your father was a great diver. But where has
all your paddling got you so far?”
Mr. Biswas said, “Is just that I don’t know anything about estate work.”
“Oho! Is because you can read and write that you don’t want to get dirt on your hands, eh?
Look at my hands.” He showed nails that were corrugated, warped and surprisingly short. The hairy
backs of his hands were scratched and discoloured; the palms were hardened, worn smooth in some
places, torn in others. “You think I can’t read and write? I can read and write better than the whole
lot of them.” He waved one hand to indicate the sisters, their husbands, their children; he held the
other palm open towards the gods in the hammock, to indicate that they were excepted. There was
amusement in his eyes now, and he opened his mouth on either side of the cigarette holder to laugh.
“What about these boys here, Mohun? The gods.”
The younger god furrowed his brow, opened his eyes wider and wider until they were
expressionless, and attempted to set his small, plump-lipped mouth.
“You think they can’t read and write too?”
“See them in the store,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Reading and selling. Reading and eating and selling.
Reading and eating and counting money. They are not afraid of getting their hands dirty.”
Not with money, Mr. Biswas told her mentally.
The younger god got up from the hammock and said, “If he don’t want to take the job on the
estate, that is his business. It serve you right, Ma. You choose your son-in-laws and they treat you
exactly how you deserve.”
“Sit down, Owad,” Mrs. Tulsi said. She turned to Seth. “This boy has a terrible temper.”
“I don’t blame him,” Seth said. “These paddlers go away, paddling their own canoe–that is
how it is, eh, Biswas?–and as soon as trouble start they will be running back here. Seth is just here
for people to insult, the same people, mark you, who he trying to help. I don’t mind. But that don’t
mean I can’t see why the boy shouldn’t mind.”
The younger god frowned even more. “Is not because my father dead that people who eating
my mother food should feel that they could call she a hen. I want Biswas to apologize to Ma.”
“Apologize-ologize,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t see how
anyone can be sorry for something he feels .”
There is, in some weak people who feel their own weakness and resent it, a certain
mechanism which, operating suddenly and without conscious direction, releases them from final
humiliation. Mr. Biswas, who had up till then been viewing his blasphemies as acts of the blackest
ingratitude, now abruptly lost his temper.
“The whole pack of you could go to hell!” he shouted. “I not going to apologize to one of the
damn lot of you.”
Astonishment and even apprehension appeared on their faces. He noted this for a lucid
moment, turned and ran up the stairs to the long room, where he began to pack with unnecessary
energy.
“You don’t care what mess you get other people in, eh?”
It was Shama, standing in the doorway, barefooted, veil low over her forehead, looking as
frightened as on that morning in the store.
“Family! Family!” Mr. Biswas said, stuffing clothes and books–Self Help , Bell’s Standard
Elocutionist , the seven volumes of Hawkins’ Electrical Guide –into a cardboard box whose top
flaps bore the circular impressions of tins of condensed milk. “I not staying here a minute longer.
Having that damn little boy talk to me like that! He does talk to all your brother-in-laws like that?”
He packed with such energy that he was soon finished. But his anger had begun to cool and he
reflected that by leaving the house again so soon he would be behaving absurdly, like a
newly-married girl. He waited for Shama to say something that would rekindle his anger. She
remained silent.
“Before I go,” he said, unpacking and re-packing the condensed milk case, “I want you to tell
the Big Boss–because it is clear that he is the big bull in the family–I want you to go and tell him
that he ain’t pay me for the signs 1 do in the store.”
“Why you don’t go and tell him yourself?” Shama was now angry and near to tears.
He tried to see himself asking Seth for money. He couldn’t. “You and all,” he said, “don’t
start provoking me. You think I want to talk to that man? You know him for a long time. He is like
a second father to you. You must ask him.”
“And suppose he ask for what you owe him?”
“I would give you straight back to him.”
“You owe him more than he owe you.”
“He owe me more than I owe him.”
They reduced it to a plain argument, which not only killed what remained of his anger, but
even left him exhilarated, though a little puzzled as to what he should do next.
Before he could decide, C and Padma, Seth’s wife, came without knocking into the room. C
was crying. Padma begged Mr. Biswas, for the sake of family unity and the family name, not to do
anything in a temper.
He became very offended, turned his back to Padma and C and walked heavily up and down
the small room.
With the arrival of the women Shama’s attitude changed. She ceased to be irritated and
suppliant and instead looked martyred. She sat stiffly on a low bench, thumb under her chin, elbow
on her knee, and opened her eyes until they were as wide and empty as the younger god’s had been
a few minutes before in the hall.
“Don’t go, brother,” C sobbed. “Your sister is begging you.” She tried to grab his ankles.
He skipped away and looked puzzled.
C, sobbing, noticed his puzzlement and elucidated: “Chinta is begging you.” She mentioned
her own name to indicate the depth of her unhappiness and the sincerity of her plea; and she began
to wail.
By coming up to plead with him Chinta had as good as confessed that it was her husband
Govind who had reported Mr. Biswas’s blasphemies to Seth; she was also claiming that Govind had
triumphed. Mr. Biswas knew that when husbands quarrelled it was the duty of the wife of the
victorious husband to placate the defeated husband, and the duty of the wife of the defeated
husband not to display anger, but skilfully to suggest that her unhappiness was due, in equal
measure, to both husbands. Shama, following Chinta’s arrival, had cast herself as the defeated wife
and was making a commendable first attempt at this difficult role.
There was no means of protesting at this subtle humiliation. Up to that moment Mr. Biswas
had never felt that he had enemies. People were simply indifferent to him. But now an enemy, the
enemy, had declared itself. And he resolved not to run away.
And having made his resolve, he felt he had already won. And, already a winner, he looked
upon Chinta and Padma with charity. Chinta was sobbing to herself, dabbing at her eyes with her
veil. He said to her, kindly, “Why your husband don’t take a job with the Gazette , eh? He is a born
reporter.” This had no effect on the flow of tears from Chinta’s bright eyes. Shama still sat martyred
and unmoving, eyes wide, knees apart, skirt draped over knees. “What the hell you playing you
thinking, eh?” She didn’t hear. Padma continued to behave with fatigued dignity. He said nothing to
her. She resembled Mrs. Tulsi but was fatter and looked older. Her sallow, unhealthy skin was oily,
and she continually fanned herself, as though tormented by some inner heat. After her first plea she
hadn’t looked at Mr. Biswas or spoken to him. She didn’t cry or look sadder than usual. She had
come on too many of these missions for them to thrill her the way they still thrilled Chinta: there
was not a man in the house with whom Seth had not quarrelled at some time or other. Padma simply
came, made her plea, sat and looked unwell. She never, in the hall or elsewhere, expressed approval
of Seth’s actions or disapproval of those of her nieces’ husbands; this won her much respect and
made her a good peacemaker.
Sternly and impatiently Mr. Biswas said, “All right. All right. Dry your tears. I not going.”
Chinta gave a short loud sob; it marked the end of her tears.
“But just tell them not to provoke me, that’s all.”
Sighing, Padma rose, heavily and unhealthily; and without another word she and Chinta left
the room.
Shama unstiffened. Her eyes narrowed a little, her fingers left her chin. She began to cry,
silently, and her body underwent a relaxing, melting process which fascinated Mr. Biswas and
infuriated him. Her arms seemed to grow rounder; her shoulders rounded and drooped; her back
curved; her eyes softened until they were quite liquid with tears; her wrists rested on her knees as if
broken; her hands flapped loose; her long fingers swung lifelessly, as if broken at every joint.
“Talk about bad blood,” Mr. Biswas said. “Talk about bad blood!”
Disappointed in Govind, Mr. Biswas began to find virtues in brothers-in-law he had
disregarded. There was Hari, a tall, pale, quiet man who spent much time at the long table, working
through mounds of rice in a slow, unenthusiastic but efficient way, watched over by his pregnant
wife. He spent even more time in the latrine, and this made him feared. “They should ring a bell
when Hari decide to go to the latrine,” Mr. Biswas told Shama, “just as how they ring a bell to tell
people they cutting off the water.” It was generally accepted at Hanuman House that Hari was a sick
man; his wife told with sorrow and pride of the terrifying diagnoses of various doctors. No man
looked less suitable for work on the estate; it was hard to imagine that thin, gentle voice ordering
labourers about, reproving the idle and shouting down the argumentative. He was in fact a pundit,
by training and inclination, and never looked so happy as when he changed from estate clothes into
a dhoti and sat in the verandah upstairs reading from some huge, ungainly Hindi book that rested on
a stylishly carved Kashmiri bookrest. He did the puja when the gods were away and he still
conducted occasional ceremonies for close friends. He offended no one and amused no one. He was
obsessed with his illnesses, his food and his religious books.
Between his estate duties, his reading in the verandah and his visits to the latrine, Hari had
little free time, and was open to approach only at the long table. But then conversation was not easy.
Hari believed in chewing every mouthful forty times, and was a noisy and preoccupied eater.
Sitting next to Hari one evening, receiving a brief ruminant glance from him and a concerned
stare from his wife, Mr. Biswas waited until Hari had champed and ground and squelched through a
mouthful. Then he hurriedly asked, “What do you feel about the Aryans?”
He was speaking of the protestant Hindu missionaries who had come from India and were
preaching that caste was unimportant, that Hinduism should accept converts, that idols should be
abolished, that women should be educated, preaching against all the doctrines the orthodox Tulsis
held dear.
“What do you feel about the Aryans?” Mr. Biswas asked.
“The Aryans?” Hari said, and started on another mouthful. His tone declared that it was a
frivolous question raised by a mischievous person.
A look of anguish came over the face of Hari’s wife.
“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said, despairingly filling in the pause. “The Aryans.”
“I don’t think much about them.” Hari bit at a pepper, baring sharp little white teeth, like a
rat’s, and surprising in such a tall and sluggish man. “I hear,” he went on, the merest hint of
amusement and reproof in his voice, “that you have been doing a lot of thinking about them.”
Mr. Biswas was almost an Aryan convert.
It was Misir, the idle journalist, who had encouraged him to go to hear Pankaj Rai. “He is not
one of those illiterate Trinidad pundits, you know,” Misir said. “Pankaj is a BA and a LLB into the
bargain. The man is a real orator. A purist, man.” Mr. Biswas had not asked what a purist was, but
the word, pronounced with reverence by Misir, appealed strongly to him, suggesting not only purity
and fastidiousness, but also elegance and breeding.
He had an additional inducement: the meeting was to be held at the home of the Naths. The
Naths owned land and a soap factory, and were the Tulsis’ most important rivals in Arwacas.
Between Naths and Tulsis of all ages there was an enmity as established and unexamined as the
enmity between Hindu and Muslim. The enmity had grown more acrimonious since the Naths had
built a new house in the modern Port of Spain style.
Purist, Mr. Biswas thought, when he saw Pankaj Rai. The man is a purist. He was elegant in a
long, black, close-fitting Indian coat; and when he shook Mr. Biswas by the hand Mr. Biswas
surrendered to his graciousness, at the same time noting with satisfaction that Pankaj Rai was as
short as himself and had an equally ugly nose. He also had unusually heavy, drooping eyelids which
could make him look comic or sinister, benevolent or supercilious. They dropped a fraction of an
inch and converted a smile into a faint but devastating sneer. This was particularly effective when
he began to ridicule the practices of orthodox Hinduism. He spoke without flourish, and slowly, as
if tasting the phrases beforehand, like a good purist; and it was a revelation to Mr. Biswas that
words and phrases which by themselves were commonplace could be welded into sentences of such
balance and beauty. He found he agreed with everything Pankaj Rai said: after thousands of years
of religion idols were an insult to the human intelligence and to God; birth was unimportant; a
man’s caste should be determined only by his actions.
After he had spoken Pankaj Rai distributed copies of his book, Reform the Only Way , and
Mr. Biswas asked for his to be autographed. Pankaj Rai did more. He wrote Mr. Biswas’s name as
well, describing him as a “dear friend”. Below this inscription Mr. Biswas wrote: “Presented to
Mohun Biswas by his dear friend Pankaj Rai, BA LLB.”
He showed book and inscriptions to Shama when he got back to Hanuman House.
“Go ahead,” Shama said.
“Let me hear what you have against him. You people say you are high-caste. But you think
Pankaj would call you that? Let me see. I wonder where Pankaj would place the Big Bull. Ha! With
the cows. Make him a cowherd. No. That is a good job.” He remembered his own cowherd days.
“Better make him a leather-worker, skinning dead animals. Yes, that’s it. The Big Bull is a member
of the leather-worker caste. And what about the two gods? Where you think Pankaj would place
them?”
“Just where you would place your brothers.”
“Road-sweeper? Little washerboys? Barber? Yes, little barbers. Pankaj would just look at
them and feel that he want a trim. And what about your mother?” He paused. “Shama! It just hit me.
Pankaj would say that your mother ain’t a Hindu at all! I mean, look at the facts. Marrying off her
favourite daughter in a registry office. Sending the two little barbers to a Roman Catholic college.
As soon as Pankaj see your mother he would start making the sign of the cross. Roman Catholic,
that’s what she is!”
“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” Shama tried to sound amused, but he could tell that she
was getting angry.
“Ro-man Cat-o-lic! Roman cat, the bitch. You think she could fool Pankaj? And here you
have Pankaj bringing the woman a message of hope, saying that Hindus should take in converts and
treat them like their own, saying that it is not necessary to be born a high-caste to be a high-caste. A
message of hope, man. And what? Your mother running the man down, when she should be grateful
like hell, kissing the man foot. Gratitude, eh?”
“I just hope this Pankaj Rai come to lift you out of this gum-pot you surely going to land
yourself in. Go ahead.”
“Shama.”
“Why you don’t wrap your little tail up and go to sleep?”
“Shama, we have another problem, girl. You think any good Hindu would get married to a
Roman Catholic girl, if he was really a good Hindu? Shama, you know what? It look to me that
your whole family is just one big low-caste bunch.”
“You should know. You married into it.”
“Married into it. Ha! You think that make me happy. I look as if I happy?”
“Why you should look as if you happy? It should make you miserable. Is the first time in your
life you eating three square meals a day. It giving your stomach too much exercise, I should say.”
“Licking up my stomach, you mean. My biggest item of food and drink in this house is soda
powder and water.”
He pressed his foot against the wall and with his big toe drew circles around one of the faded
lotus decorations.
He intended to discuss the Aryans less flippantly with Hari. He imagined that Hari, like
Pundit Jairam and many other pundits, would welcome disputation. But at the long table Hari
remained cold, his wife looked aghast, and Mr. Biswas left him to his food.
When Hari had changed and was sitting in the verandah upstairs, humming from some holy
book in his cheerless way, Mr. Biswas, piqued and anxious to provoke some reaction, brought out
his copy of Reform the Only Way and showed it, drawing Hari’s attention to the inscriptions. Hari
looked briefly at the book and said, “Mm.”
Having failed with Hari, Mr. Biswas decided that it would be prudent to withhold the message
of hope from the other brothers-in-law, who were less intelligent and more temperamental.
About a week later Seth met Mr. Biswas in the hall and said, laughing, “How is your dear
friend Pankaj Rai?”
“What you asking me for?” Mr. Biswas nearly always spoke English at Hanuman House,
even when the other person spoke Hindi; it had become one of his principles. “Why you don’t ask
Hari, the stargazer?”
“You know Rai nearly went to jail?”
“Some people would say anything.” But Mr. Biswas was disturbed by this news about the
purist.
“These Aryans say all sorts of things about women,” Seth said. “And you know why? They
want to lift them up to get on top of them. You know Rai was interfering with Nath’s
daughter-in-law? So they asked him to leave. But a lot of other things left the house when he left.”
“But the man is a BA.”
“And LLB. I know. I wouldn’t trust an Aryan with my great-grandmother.”
“Is a trick. The man is a dear friend. A purist. Pankaj wouldn’t do a thing like that. You never
hear him talk, that’s why.”
“Nath’s daughter-in-law heard, though. She didn’t like what she heard.”
“Scandal, scandal. Is just a piece of scandal you stick-in-the-mud Sanatanists dig up.”
“If I had my way,” Seth said, “I would cut the balls off all these Aryans. Have they converted
you yet?”
“That is my own business.”
“I hear they have made some Creole converts. Brothers for you, Mohun!”
In the verandah Mr. Biswas saw Hari in dhoti, vest and beads, reading.
“Hello , pundit !” Mr. Biswas said.
Hari stared blankly at Mr. Biswas and returned to his book.
Mr. Biswas went past a door with glass panes of many colours into the Book Room. Here,
along the length of one wall, was a bookcase choked with the religious literature Hari was working
through. Few of the books were bound. Many were simply stacks of large loose brown-edged sheets
which looked stained rather than printed. Each sheet carried partial impressions of the sheet above
and the sheet below; the ink had turned russet; and each letter lay in a patch of oil.
Mr. Biswas turned and walked back to the verandah. He put his head around a brilliant blue
pane and whispered loudly down the verandah to Hari, “Hello, Mr. God.”
Hari, humming, didn’t hear.
“I got a name for another one of your brother-in-laws,” he told Shama that evening, lying on
his blanket, his right foot on his left knee, peeling off a broken nail from his big toe. “The
constipated holy man.”
“Hari?” she said, and pulled herself up, realizing that she had begun to take part in the game.
He slapped his yellow, flabby calf and pushed his finger into the flesh. The calf yielded like
sponge.
She pulled his hand away. “Don’t do that. I can’t bear to see you do that. You should be
ashamed, a young man like you, being so soft.”
“That is all the bad food I eating in this place.” He was still holding her hand. “Well, as a
matter of fact, I have quite a few names for him. The holy ghost. You like that?”
“Man!”
“And what about the two gods? It ever strike you that they look like two monkeys? So, you
have one concrete monkey-god outside the house and two living ones inside. They could just call
this place the monkey house and finish. Eh, monkey, bull, cow, hen. The place is like a blasted zoo,
man.”
“And what about you? The barking puppy dog?”
“Man’s best friend.” He flung up his legs and his thin slack calves shook. With a push of his
finger he kept the calves swinging.
“Stop doing that!”
By now Shama’s head was on his soft arm, and they were lying side by side.
Abandoning the brothers-in-law altogether, Mr. Biswas contented himself with the company
of the Aryans at the Naths”. Pankaj Rai was no longer with them and no one was willing to talk
about him. His place had been taken by a man who introduced himself as Shivlochan, BA
(Professor). He was no purist. He spoke pompous Hindi and little English, and continually allowed
himself to be bullied by Misir. Misir was keen on discussions and resolutions, and under his
guidance they passed resolutions that education was important, that child marriage should be
abolished, that young people should choose their own spouses.
Misir, who had suffered from his parents’ choice, said, “The present system is nothing more
than cat-in-bag.”
(Mr. Biswas loved Misir’s phrases. “That is all your family do for you,” he said to Shama that
evening. “Marry off the whole pack of you cat-in-bag.”
“Don’t think I don’t know where you picking up all that,” Shama said. “Go ahead.”)
“Look what I got,” Misir said, “from marrying cat-in-bag. What about you, Mohun? You
happy about this cat-in-bag business?”
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Biswas said, “I didn’t get married cat-in-bag. I did see the girl
first.”
“You mean they let you see the child first?” Whatever remained of Misir’s orthodox instincts
was clearly outraged.
“Well, she was just there, you know, in the shop, selling cloth and socks and ribbon. And I see
her and then–”
“All the old confusion, eh?”
“Well, not exactly. Things just happen after that.”
“I didn’t know,” Misir said. “Well, you ask for what you get. Anyway, I think we could say
we are against this early cat-in-bag marriage business.”
“We could say that,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Now, how are we going to put our ideas across to the masses?” Misir said, and Mr. Biswas
noted that Misir’s manner was growing more and more like Pankaj Rai’s. “I suggest persuasion.”
“Peaceful persuasion,” Shivlochan said.
“Peaceful persuasion. Start like Mohammed. Start small. Start with your own family. Start
with your own wife. Then move on. I want everybody here to go home this evening determined to
pass the word on to his neighbours. And I promise you, my friends, that in no time Arwacas will
become a stronghold of Aryanism.”
“Just a moment,” Mr. Biswas said. “Not so fast. Start with your own family? You don’t know
my family. I think we better leave them out.”
“This is a helluva man,” Misir said. “You want to convert three hundred million Hindus and
you let one backward little family of country bookies frighten you?”
“I telling you, man. You don’t know my family.”
“All right,” Misir said, a little of his bounce gone. “Now, supposing peaceful persuasion
doesn’t work. Just supposing. What do you suggest, my friends? By what means can we bring about
the conversion we so earnestly desire?” The last two sentences had occurred in one of Pankaj Rai’s
speeches.
“By the sword,” Mr. Biswas said. “The only thing. Conversion by the sword.”
“That’s how I feel too,” Misir said.
“Just a minute, gentlemen,” Shivlochan, BA (Professor), said, rising. “You are rejecting the
doctrine of non-violence. Do you realize that?”
“Rejecting it just for a short time,” Misir said impatiently. “Short short time.”
Shivlochan sat down.
“I think, then, that we could pass a resolution to the effect that peaceful persuasion should be
followed by militant conversion. All right?”
“I think so,” Mr. Biswas said.
“I think this would make a good little story,” Misir said. “Going to telephone it in to the
Sentinel straight away.”
On the country page of the Sentinel the next day there was an item, two inches high, about
the proceedings of the Arwacas Aryan Association, the AAA. Mr. Biswas’s name was mentioned,
as was his address.
He left an open and marked copy of the paper on the long table in the hall. And when that
evening Shama came up as he was reading Reform the Only Way and said that Seth wanted to see
him, Mr. Biswas didn’t argue. Whistling in his soundless way, he put on his trousers and ran down
to face the family tribunal.
“I see you have got your name in the papers,” Seth said.
Mr. Biswas shrugged.
The gods swung slowly in the hammock, frowning.
“What are you trying to do? Disgrace the family? Here you have these boys trying to get on in
the Catholic college. Do you believe this sort of thing is going to help them in any way?”
The gods looked injured.
“Jealous,” Mr. Biswas said. “Everybody just jealous.”
“What have you got for them to be jealous of?” Mrs. Tulsi asked.
The elder god got up, in tears. “I not going to remain sitting down in this hammock and have
any-and-everybody in this house insulting me. Is your fault, Ma. Is your son-in-law. You just bring
them in here to eat all the food my father money buy and then to insult your sons.”
It was a grave charge, and Mrs. Tulsi held the boy to her and embraced him and wiped away
his tears with her veil.
“It’s all right, son,” Seth said. “I am still here to look after you.” He turned to Mr. Biswas.
“All right,” he said in English. “You see what you cause. You want to get the family in trouble. You
want to see them go to jail. They feeding you, but you want to see me and Mai go to jail. You want
to see the two boys, who ain’t got no father, go through life without a education. All that is all right.
This house is like a republic already.”
Sisters and brothers-in-law froze into attitudes of sullen penitence. Seth’s gratuitous remark
about the republic was a rebuke to them all; it meant that Mr. Biswas’s behaviour was bringing
discredit upon the other brothers-in-law.
“So,” Seth went on. “You want to see girl children educated and choosing their own husband,
eh? The same sort of thing that your sister do.”
The sisters and their husbands relaxed.
Mr. Biswas said, “My sister better than anybody here, and better off too. And too besides, she
living in a house a lot cleaner.”
Seth rested his elbow on the table and smoked sadly, looking down at his bluchers. “The
Black Age,” he said softly in Hindi. “The Black Age has come at last. Sister, we have taken in a
serpent. It is my fault. You must blame me.”
“I not asking to stay here, you know,” Mr. Biswas said. “I believe in the old ways too. You
make me marry your daughter, you promise to do this and do that. So far I ain’t got nothing. The
day you give me what you promise me, I gone.”
“So you want girl children learning to read and write and picking up boy-friends? You want
to see them wearing short frocks?”
“I ain’t say a thing about short frocks. I talking about what you promise me.”
“Short frocks. And love letters. Love letters! Remember the love letter you write Shama?”
Shama giggled. The sisters and their husbands, more at ease now, giggled. Mrs. Tulsi gave a
short explosive laugh. Only the gods remained stern; but Mrs. Tulsi, still embracing the elder god,
coaxed a smile from him.
So the encounter was a defeat. But Mr. Biswas, so far from being cast down, was exhilarated.
He had no doubt now that in his campaign against the Tulsis–for that was how he thought of it–he
was winning.
Unexpected support came through the Aryan Association.
The Association attracted the attention of Mrs. Weir, the wife of the owner of a small
sugar-estate. She didn’t pay her labourers well but was respected by them for her interest in religion
and the concern she showed for their spiritual welfare. Most of her labourers were Hindus and Mrs.
Weir was particularly interested in Hinduism. It was rumoured that her purpose was an eventual
wholesale conversion of Hindus, but Misir denied this. He said he had practically converted her .
She did indeed come to an Aryan meeting. And she invited some of the Aryans to tea. Mr. Biswas,
Misir, Shivlochan and two others went. Misir talked. Mrs. Weir listened and never disagreed. Misir
gave books and pamphlets. Mrs. Weir said she looked forward to reading them. Just before they
left, Mrs. Weir presented everyone with copies of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the
Discourses of Epictetus, and a number of other booklets.
For days afterwards Hanuman House was subjected to the propaganda of a little-known
Christian sect. Mrs. Weir’s booklets turned up on the long table, in the Tulsi Store, in the kitchen, in
bedrooms. A religious picture was nailed on the inside of the latrine-door. When a booklet was
found on the prayer-room shrine, Seth summoned Mr. Biswas and said, “The next thing will be for
you to start teaching the children hymns. I can’t understand how anyone could have even tried to
turn you into a pundit.”
Mr. Biswas said, “Well, since I been in this house I begin to get the feeling that to be a good
Hindu you must be a good Roman Catholic first.”
The elder god, seeing himself attacked, got up from the hammock, already prepared to cry.
“Look at him,” Mr. Biswas said. “Little Jack Horner. If he just put his hand in his shirt he pull
up a crucifix.”
The elder god did wear a crucifix. It was regarded in the house as an exotic and desirable
charm. The elder god wore many charms and it was thought fitting that someone so valuable should
be well protected. On the Sunday before examination week he was bathed by Mrs. Tulsi in water
consecrated by Hari; the soles of his feet were soaked in lavender water; he was made to drink a
glass of Guinness stout; and he left Hanuman House, a figure of awe, laden with crucifix, sacred
thread and beads, a mysterious sachet, a number of curious armlets, consecrated coins, and a lime in
each trouser pocket.
“You call yourself Hindus?” Mr. Biswas said.
Shama tried to silence Mr. Biswas.
The younger god got out of the hammock and stamped. “I not going to remain in this
hammock and hear my brother insulted, Ma. You don’t care.”
“What?” said Mr. Biswas. “I insult somebody? At the Catholic college they make him close
his eyes and open his mouth and say Hail Mary. What about that?”
“Man!” Shama said.
The elder god was crying.
The younger god said, “You don’t care, Ma.”
“Biswas!” Seth said. “You want to feel my hand?”
Shama pulled at Mr. Biswas’s shirt and he struggled as though he were being pulled away
from a physical fight which he was winning and wanted to continue. But he had noted Seth’s threat
and allowed himself to be pushed slowly up the stairs.
Halfway up they heard Seth calling for his wife. “Padma! Come quickly and look after your
sister. She is going to faint.”
Someone raced up the steps. It was Chinta. She ignored Mr. Biswas and said accusingly to
Shama, “Mai faint.”
Shama looked hard at Mr. Biswas.
“Faint, eh?” Mr. Biswas said.
Chinta didn’t say any more. She hurried on to the concrete house to prepare Mrs. Tulsi’s
bedroom, the Rose Room.
As soon as Shama had seen Mr. Biswas safely to their room she left him, and he heard her
running across the Book Room and down the stairs.
Mrs. Tulsi often fainted. Whenever this happened a complex ritual was at once set in motion.
One daughter was despatched to get the Rose Room ready, and Mrs. Tulsi was taken there by other
daughters working under the direction of Padma, Seth’s wife. If, as often happened, Padma was ill
herself, Sushila took her place. Sushila’s position in the family was unique. She was a widowed
daughter whose only child had died. Because of her suffering she was respected, but though she
gave herself the airs of authority her status was undefined, at times appearing as high as Mrs.
Tulsi’s, at times lower than Miss Blackie’s. It was only during Mrs. Tulsi’s illnesses that anyone
could be sure of Sushila’s power.
In the Rose Room, then, after a faint, one daughter fanned Mrs. Tulsi; two massaged her
smooth, shining and surprisingly firm legs; one soaked bay rum into her loosened hair and
massaged her forehead. The other daughters stood by, ready to carry out the instructions of Padma
or Sushila. The gods were often there as well, looking grimly on. When the massage and the bay
rum-soaking was over Mrs. Tulsi turned on her stomach and asked the younger god to walk on her,
from the soles of her feet to her shoulders. The elder god had done this duty in the past but had
grown too heavy.
The sons-in-law found themselves alone in the wooden house with the children, who knew
without being told that they had to be silent. All activity was suspended; the house became dead.
One of the sons-in-law was invariably responsible for precipitating Mrs. Tulsi’s faint. He was now
hounded by silence and hostility. If he attempted to make friendly talk many glances instantly
reproved him for his frivolity. If he moped in a corner or went up to his room he was condemned
for his callousness and ingratitude. He was expected to stay in the hall and show all the signs of
contrition and unease. He waited for the sounds of footsteps coming from the Rose Room; he
accosted a busy, offended sister and, ignoring snubs, made whispered inquiries about Mrs. Tulsi’s
condition. Next morning he came down, shy and sheepish. Mrs. Tulsi would be better. She would
ignore him. But that evening forgiveness would be in the air. The offender would be spoken to as if
nothing had happened, and he would respond with eagerness.
Mr. Biswas didn’t go to the hall. He remained on his blanket in the long room, doodling and
thinking out subjects for the articles he had promised to write for the New Aryan, a magazine Misir
was planning. He couldn’t concentrate, and soon the paper was covered with repetitions, in various
styles, of the letters RES, a combination he had found challenging and beautiful ever since he had
done a sign for a restaurant.
The room smelled of hartshorn.
“You happy, eh, now that you make Mai faint?”
It was Shama. Her hands were still oily.
“Which foot you rub?” Mr. Biswas asked. “You should be glad they allow you to touch a
foot. You know, it does beat me why all you sisters so anxious to look after the old hen. She did
look after you? She just pick you up and marry you off to any old coconut-seller and crab-catcher.
And still everybody rushing up to rub foot and squeeze head and hand smelling-salts.”
“You know, nobody hearing you talk would believe that you come to this house with no more
things than you could hang up on a one-inch nail.”
It was a familiar attack. He ignored it.
Next morning he went down to the hall and called briskly, “Morning, morning. Morning,
everybody.” He got no reply. He said, “Shama, Shama. Food, girl. Food.” She brought him a tall
cup of tea. Breakfast was tea and biscuits. The biscuits came in a vast drum, returnable to the biscuit
makers: the largest economy size, the method of bulk-purchase used by caf -owners. While he was
diving into the drum, turning away straw, feeling for biscuits–a pleasant task, for the straw and
biscuits together had a smell that was good and even better than the meal–while he was doing this,
Mrs. Tulsi came into the hall, fatigued and heavy, looking almost as old as Padma. Her veil was low
over her forehead and every now and then she pressed a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne to
her nose. Without her teeth she looked decrepit, but there was about her decrepitude a quality of
ever-lastingness.
“You feeling better, Mai?” Mr. Biswas asked, stacking some biscuits on a chipped enamel
plate. He spoke very cheerfully.
The hall was hushed.
“Yes, son,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I am feeling better.”
And it was Mr. Biswas’s turn to be astonished.
(“I was wrong about your mother,” he told Shama before he left that morning. “She is not a
old hen at all. Nor a old cow.”
“I glad you learning gratitude,” Shama said.
“She is a she-fox. A old she-fox. What they call that? You know what I mean, man. You
remember your Macdougall’s Grammar . Abbot, abbess. Stag, roe, Hart, hind. Fox, what?”
“I not going to tell you.”
“I going to find out. In the meantime, remember the name change. She is the old she-fox.”)
He remained on the staircase landing, sinking lower and lower through the torn seat of a
cane-bottomed chair in front of the stained, battered, disused and useless piano, sipping his tea,
cracking biscuits and dropping the pieces into the tea. He watched the pieces swell out and rescued
them with his spoon just when they started to sink. Then swiftly, before the soggy biscuit that
drooped over the spoon could fall off, he thrust the spoon into his mouth. All around him children
were doing the same.
The younger god came down the stairs. He had been doing the morning puja . With his small
dhoti, small vest, beads and miniature caste-marks he looked like a toy holy man. He carried a brass
plate on which there was a cube of burning camphor. The camphor had been used to give incense to
the images in the prayer-room; now it was to be offered to every member of the family.
The god went first to Mrs. Tulsi. She put her handkerchief in her bosom, touched the camphor
flame with her fingertips and carried her fingertips to her forehead. “Rama, Rama,” she said. Then
she added, “Take it to your brother Mohun.”
The hall was hushed again. And again Mr. Biswas was astonished.
Sushila, clinging to her sickroom authority of the previous evening, said, “Yes, Owad. Take it
to your brother Mohun.”
The god hesitated, frowning. Then he sucked his teeth, stamped up to the landing and offered
the aromatic camphor flame to Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas rescued more sodden biscuit from the
enamel cup. He put his mouth under the spoon, caught the biscuit that broke off, chewed noisily and
said, “You could take that away. You know I don’t hold with this idol worship.”
The god, annoyed just the moment before, was stupefied almost into argument and coaxing
before the full horror of Mr. Biswas’s rejection came to him. He stood still, the camphor burning,
melting on the plate.
The hall was still.
Mrs. Tulsi was silent. Forgetting her frailty and fatigue, she got up and walked slowly up the
stairs.
“Man!” Shama cried.
Shama’s shout aroused the god. He walked down to the hall, tears of anger in his eyes, saying,
“I didn’t want to go and offer him anything. I didn’t. I know the amount of respect he have for
people.”
Sushila said, “Shh. Not while you are carrying the plate.”
“Man!” Shama said. “What you go and do now?”
Mr. Biswas drained his cup, used his spoon to scrape up the mess of biscuit at the bottom, ate
that and, getting up, said, “What I do? I ain’t do nothing. I just don’t believe in this idol worship,
that is all.”
“M-m-m-m. Mm !” Miss Blackie made a loud purring noise. She was offended. She was a
Roman Catholic and went to mass every morning, but she had seen the Hindu rites performed every
day for many years and regarded them as inviolate as her own.
“Idols are stepping-stones to the worship of the real thing,” Mr. Biswas said, quoting Pankaj
Rai to the hall. “They are necessary only in a spiritually backward society. Look at that little boy
down there. You think he know what he was doing this morning?”
The god stamped and said shrilly, “I know a lot more about it than you, you–you Christian !”
Miss Blackie purred again, now deeply offended.
Sushila said to the god, “You must never lose your temper when you are doing puja , Owad. It
isn’t nice.”
“It nice for him to insult me and Ma and everybody else the way he doing?”
“Just give him enough rope. He will hang himself.”
In the long room Mr. Biswas gathered his painting equipment and sang over and over:
In the snowy and the blowy,
In the blowy and the snowy.
Words and tune were based, remotely, on Roaming in the Gloaming , which the choir at Lai’s
school had once sung to entertain important visitors from the Canadian Mission.
Yet almost as soon as he had left Hanuman House through the side gate, Mr. Biswas’s high
spirits vanished, and a depression fell upon him and lasted all day. He worked badly. He had to
paint a large sign on a corrugated iron paling. Doing letters on a corrugated surface was bad
enough; to paint a cow and a gate, as he had to, was maddening. His cow looked stiff, deformed and
sorrowful, and undid the gaiety of the rest of the advertisement.
He was strained and irritable when he went back to Hanuman House. The aggrieved and
aggressive stares he received in the hall reminded him of his morning triumph. All his joy at that
had turned into disgust at his condition. The campaign against the Tulsis, which he had been
conducting with such pleasure, now seemed pointless and degrading. Suppose, Mr. Biswas thought
in the long room, suppose that at one word I could just disappear from this room, what would
remain to speak of me? A few clothes, a few books. The shouts and thumps in the hall would
continue; the puja would be done; in the morning the Tulsi Store would open its doors.
He had lived in many houses. And how easy it was to think of those houses without him! At
this moment Pundit Jairam would be at a meeting or he would be eating at home, looking forward
to an evening with his books. Soanie stood in the doorway, darkening the room, waiting for the least
gesture of command. In Tara’s back verandah Ajodha sat relaxed in his rockingchair, his eyes
closed, listening perhaps to That Body of Yours being read by Rabidat, who sat at an awkward
angle, trying to hide the smell of drink and tobacco on his breath. Tara was about, harrying the
cowman (it was milking-time) or harrying the yard boy or the servant girl, harrying somebody. In
none of these places he was being missed because in none of these places had he ever been more
than a visitor, an upsetter of routine. Was Bipti thinking of him in the back trace? But she herself
was a derelict. And, even more remote, that house of mud and grass in the swamplands: probably
pulled down now and ploughed up. Beyond that, a void. There was nothing to speak of him.
He heard footsteps and Shama came into the room with a brass plate loaded with rice, curried
potatoes, lentils and coconut chutney.
“How often you want me to tell you that I hate those blasted brass plates?”
She put the plate on the floor.
He walked round it. “Nobody ever teach you hygiene at school? Rice, potatoes. All that damn
starch.” He tapped his belly. “You want to blow me up?” At the sight of Shama his depression had
turned to anger, but he spoke jocularly.
“I always say,” Shama said, “that you must complain only when you start providing your own
food.”
He went to the window, washed his hands, gargled and spat.
Someone shouted from below, “Up there! Look what you doing!”
“I know, I know,” Shama said, running to the window. “I know this was bound to happen one
day. You spit on somebody.”
He looked out with interest. “Who it is? The old she-fox, or one of the gods?”
“You spit on Owad.”
They heard him complaining.
Mr. Biswas took another mouthful of water and gargled. Then, with cheeks puffed out, he
leaned as far out of the window as he could.
“Don’t think I not seeing you,” the god shouted. “I marking what you doing, Mr. Biswas. But
I standing up right here and if you spit on me again I going to tell Ma.”
“Tell, you little son of a bitch,” Mr. Biswas muttered, spitting.
“Man!”
“O God!” the god exclaimed.
“You lucky little monkey,” Mr. Biswas said. He had missed.
“Man!” Shama cried, and dragged him from the window.
He walked slowly around the brass plate.
“Walk,” Shama said. “You walk until you tired. But wait until you provide your own food
before you start criticizing the food other people give you.”
“Who give you that message to give me? Your mother?” He pulled his top teeth behind his
lower teeth, but his long floursack pants prevented him from looking menacing.
“Nobody didn’t give me any message to give you. It is just something I think of myself.”
“You think of it yourself, eh?”
He had seized the brass plate, spilling rice on the floor, and was rushing to the Demerara
window. Going to throw the whole damned thing out, he had decided. But his violence calmed him,
and at the window he had another thought: throw the plate out and you could kill somebody. He
arrested his hurling gesture, and merely tilted the plate. The food slipped off easily, leaving a few
grains of rice sticking to streaks of lentils and oily, bubble-ridden trails of curry.
“O God! Oo–Go-o-od!”
It began as a gentle cry and rose rapidly to a sustained bawling which aroused sympathetic
shrieks from babies all over the house. All at once the bawling was cut off, and seconds later–it
seemed much later–Mr. Biswas heard a deep, grating, withdrawing snuffle. “I going to tell Ma,” the
god cried. “Ma, come and see what your son-in-law do to me. He cover me down with his dirty
food.” After a sirenlike intake of breath the bawling continued.
Shama looked martyred.
There was considerable commotion below. Several people were shouting at once, babies
screamed, there was much subsidiary bawling and chatter, and the hall resounded with agitated
movements.
Heavy footsteps made the stairs shake, rattled the glass panes on doors, drummed across the
Book Room, and Govind was in Mr. Biswas’s chamber.
“Is you!” Govind shouted, breathing hard, his handsome face contorted. “Is you who spit on
Owad.”
Mr. Biswas was frightened.
He heard more footsteps on the stairs. The bawling drew nearer.
“Spit?” Mr. Biswas said. “I ain’t spit on anybody. I just gargle out of the window and throw
away some bad food.”
Shama screamed.
Govind threw himself on Mr. Biswas.
Caught by surprise, stupefied by fear, Mr. Biswas neither shouted nor hit back at Govind, and
allowed himself to be pummelled. He was struck hard and often on the jaw, and with every blow
Govind said, “Is you.” Vaguely Mr. Biswas was aware of women massing in the room, screaming,
sobbing, falling upon Govind and himself. He was acutely aware of the god bawling, right in his
ear, it seemed: a dry, deliberate, scraping noise. Abruptly the bawling ceased. “Yes, is he!” the god
said. “Is he. He asking for this a long time now.” And at every cuff and kick Govind gave, the god
grunted, as though he himself had given the blow. The women were above Mr. Biswas and Govind,
their hair and veils falling loose. One veil tickled Mr. Biswas’s nose.
“Stop him!” Chinta cried. “Govind will kill Biswas if you don’t stop him. He is a terrible
man, I tell you, when his temper is up.” She burst into a short, sharp wail. “Stop it, stop it. They will
send Govind to the gallows if you don’t stop it. Stop it before they make me a widow.”
Punched on his hollow chest, short-jabbed on his soft, rising belly, Mr. Biswas found, to his
surprise, that his mind remained quite clear. What the hell is that woman crying for? he thought.
She is going to be a widow all right, but what about me? He was trying to encircle Govind with his
arms, but was unable to do more than tap him on the back. Govind didn’t appear to notice the taps.
Mr. Biswas would have been surprised if he had. He wanted to scratch and pinch Govind, but
reflected that it would be unmanly to do so.
“Kill him!” the god shouted. “Kill him, Uncle Govind.”
“Owad, Owad,” Chinta said. “How can you say a thing like that?” She pulled the god to her
and pressed his head against her bosom. “You too? Do you want to make me a widow?”
The god allowed himself to be embraced, but twisted his head to see the struggle and kept on
shouting, “Kill him, Uncle Govind. Kill him.”
The women were having little effect on Govind. They had succeeded only in lessening the
swing of his arms, but his short jabs were powerful. Mr. Biswas felt them all. They no longer
caused pain.
“Kill him, Uncle Govind!”
He doesn’t want any encouragement, Mr. Biswas thought.
Neighbours were shouting.
“What happening, Mai? Mai! Mrs. Tulsi! Mr. Seth! What happening?”
Their urgent, frightened voices frightened Mr. Biswas. Suddenly he heard himself bawling,
“O God! I dead. I dead. He will kill me.”
His terror silenced the house.
It stilled Govind’s arms. It stilled the god, and gave him a fleeting vision of black policemen,
courthouses, gallows, graves, coffins.
The women lifted themselves off Govind and Mr. Biswas. Govind, breathing heavily, lifted
himself off Mr. Biswas.
How I hate people who breathe like that, Mr. Biswas thought. And how that Govind smells! It
wasn’t a smell of sweat, but of oil, body oil, associated in Mr. Biswas’s mind with the pimples on
Govind’s face. How unpleasant it must be, to be married to a man like that!
“Has he killed him?” Chinta asked. She was calmer; her voice held pride and genuine
concern. “Talk, brother. Talk. Talk to your sister. Get him to say something, somebody.”
Now that Govind was off his chest Mr. Biswas’s only concern was to make sure that he was
properly dressed. He hoped nothing had happened to his pants. He moved a hand down to
investigate.
“He is all right,” Sushila said.
Someone bent over him. That smell of oil, Vick’s Vapo-rub, garlic and raw vegetables told
him it was Padma. “Are you all right?” she asked, and shook him.
He turned over on his side, his face to the wall.
“He is all right,” Govind said, and added in English, “Is a good thing all you people did come,
otherwise I woulda be swinging on the gallows for this man.”
Chinta gave a sob.
Shama had maintained her martyr’s attitude throughout, sitting on the low bench, her skirt
draped over her knees, one hand supporting her chin, her staring eyes misting over with tears.
“Spitting on me, eh?” the god said. “Go ahead. Why you don’t spit now? Coming and
laughing at our religion. Laughing at me when I do puja . I know the good I doing myself when I do
puja , you hear.”
“It’s all right, son,” Govind said. “Nobody can insult you and Mai when I am around.”
“Leave him alone, Govind,” Padma said. “Leave him, Owad.”
The incident was over. The room emptied.
Left alone, Shama and Mr. Biswas remained as they were, Shama staring through the
doorway, Mr. Biswas considering the lotuses on the pale green wall.
They heard the hall return to life. The evening meal, delayed, was being laid out with unusual
zest. Babies were consoled with songs, clapping, chuckles and baby-talk. Children were scolded
with exceptional good humour. Between everyone downstairs there was for the moment a new
bond, and Mr. Biswas recognized this bond as himself.
“Go and get me a tin of red salmon,” he said to Shama, without turning from the wall. “And
some hops bread.”
Her throat was tickling. She coughed and tried to hide the swallow by sighing.
This wearied him further. He got up, his pants hanging loose, and looked at her. She was still
staring through the doorway into the Book Room. His face felt heavy. He put a hand to one cheek
and worked his jaw. It moved stiffly.
Tears spilled over from Shama’s big eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“What happen? Somebody beat you too?”
She shook her tears away, without removing her hand from her chin.
“Go and get me a tin of salmon. Canadian. And get some bread and peppersauce.”
“What happen? You have a craving? You making baby?”
He would have liked to hit her. But that would have been ridiculous after what had just
happened.
“You making baby?” Shama repeated. She rose, shook down her skirt and straightened it.
Loudly, as though trying to catch the attention of the people downstairs, she said, “Go and get it
yourself. You not going to start ordering me around, you hear.” She blew her nose, wiped it, and
left.
He was alone. He gave a kick at a lotus on the wall. The noise startled him, his toe hurt, and
he aimed another kick at his pile of books. He sent them toppling and marvelled at the endurance
and uncomplainingness of inanimate objects. The bent corner of the cover of Bell’s Standard
Elocutionist was like a wound silently, accusingly borne. He stooped to pick the books up, then
decided it would be a sign of self contempt to do so. Better for them to lie like that for Shama to see
and even rearrange. He passed a hand over his face. It felt heavy and dead. Squinting downwards,
he could see the rise of cheek. His jaw ached. He was beginning to ache all over. It was odd that the
blows had made so little impression at the time. Surprise was a good neutralizer. Perhaps it was the
same with animals. Jungle life could be bearable, then; it was part of God’s plan. He went over to
the cheap mirror hanging at the side of the window. He had never been able to see properly in it. It
was an idiotic place to put a mirror, and he was mad enough to pull it down. He didn’t. He stepped
to one side and looked over his shoulder at his reflection. He knew his face felt heavy; he had no
idea it looked so absurd. But he had to go out, leave the house for the time being, get his salmon,
bread and peppersauce–bad for him, but the suffering would come later. He put on his trousers, and
the rattle of the belt buckle was such a precise, masculine sound that he silenced it at once. He put
on his shirt and opened the second button to reveal his hollow chest. But his shoulders were fairly
broad. He wished he could devote himself to developing his body. How could he, though, with all
that bad food from that murky kitchen? They had salmon only on Good Friday: the influence,
doubtless, of the orthodox Roman Catholic Hindu Mrs. Tulsi. He pulled his hat low over his
forehead and thought that in the dark he might just get away with his face.
As he went down the stairs the chatter became a babel. Past the landing, he waited for the
silence, the reanimation.
It happened as he feared.
Shama didn’t look at him. Among gay sisters she was the gayest.
Padma said. “You better feed Mohun, Shama.”
Govind didn’t look up. He was smiling, at nothing, it seemed, and was eating in his savage,
noisy way, rice and curry spilled all over his hairy hand and trickling down to his wrist. Soon, Mr.
Biswas knew, he would clean his hand with a swift, rasping lick.
Mr. Biswas, his back to everyone in the hall, said, “I not eating any of the bad food from this
house.”
“Well, nobody not going to beg you, you hear,” Shama said.
He curled the brim of his hat over his eye and went down into the courtyard, lit only by the
light from the hall.
The god said, “Anyone see a spy pass through here?”
Mr. Biswas heard the laughter.
Under the eaves of a bicycle shop across the High Street an oyster stall was yellowly, smokily
lit by a flambeau with a thick spongy wick. Oysters lay in a shining heap, many-faceted, grey and
black and yellow. Two bottles, stopped with twists of brown paper, contained red peppersauce.
Postponing the salmon, Mr. Biswas crossed the road and asked the man, “How the oysters
going?”
“Two for a cent.”
“Start opening.”
The man shouted, released into happy activity. From somewhere in the darkness a woman
came running up. “Come on,” the man said. “Help open them.” They put a bucket of water on the
stall, washed the oysters, opened them with short blunt knives, and washed them again. Mr. Biswas
poured peppersauce into the shell, swallowed, held out his hand for another. The peppersauce
scalded his lips.
The oyster man was talking drunkenly, in a mixture of Hindi and English. “My son is a
helluva man. I feel that something is seriously wrong with him. One day he put a tin can on the
fence and come running inside the house. ‘The gun, Pa,’ he said. ‘Quick, give me the gun.’ I give
him the gun. He run to the window and shoot. The tin can fall. ‘Pa,’ he say. ‘Look. I shoot work. I
shoot ambition. They dead.’ “ The flambeau dramatized the oyster man’s features, filling hollows
with shadow, putting a shine on his temples, above his eyebrows, along his nose, along his
cheek-bones. Suddenly he flung down his knife and pulled out a stick from below his stall. He
waved the stick in front of Mr. Biswas. “Anybody!” he said. “Tell anybody to come!”
The woman didn’t notice. She went on opening oysters, laying them in her scratched, red
palms, prising the ugly shells open, cutting the living oysters from their moorings to the pure,
just-exposed inside shell.
“Tell anybody,” the man said. “Anybody at all.”
“Stop!” Mr. Biswas said.
The woman took her hand out of the bucket and replaced a dripping oyster on the heap.
The man put away his stick. “Stop?” He looked saddened, and ceased to be frightening. He
began to count the empty shells.
The woman disappeared into the darkness.
“Twenty-six,” the man said. “Thirteen cents.”
Mr. Biswas paid. The raw, fresh smell of oysters was now upsetting him. His stomach was
full and heavy, but unsatisfied. The peppersauce had blistered his lips. Then the pains began.
Nevertheless he went on to Mrs. Seeung’s. The high, cavernous caf was feebly lit. Flies were
asleep everywhere, and Mr. Seeung was half-asleep behind the counter, his porcupinish head bent
over a Chinese newspaper.
Mr. Biswas bought a tin of salmon and two loaves of bread. The bread looked and smelled
stale. He knew that in his present state bread would only bring on nausea, but it gave him some
satisfaction that he was breaking one of the Tulsi taboos by eating shop bread, a habit they
considered feckless, negroid and unclean. The salmon repelled him; he thought it tasted of tin; but
he felt compelled to eat to the end. And as he ate, his distress increased. Secret eating never did him
any good.
Yet what he considered his disgrace was in fact his triumph.
The next morning Seth summoned him and said in English, “I come back late last night from
Carapichaima, just looking for my food and my bed and the first thing I hear is that you try to beat
up Owad. I don’t think we could stand you here any longer. You want to paddle your own canoe.
All right, go ahead and paddle. When you start getting your tail wet, don’t bother to come back to
me or Mai, you hear. This was a nice united family before you come. You better go away before
you do any more mischief and I have to lay my hand on you.”
So Mr. Biswas moved to The Chase, to the shop. Shama was pregnant when they moved.
4. The Chase
The chase was a long, straggling settlement of mud huts in the heart of the sugarcane area.
Few outsiders went to The Chase. The people who lived there worked on the estates and the roads.
The world beyond the sugarcane fields was remote and the village was linked to it only by
villagers’ carts and bicycles, wholesalers’ vans and lorries, and an occasional private motorbus that
ran to no timetable and along no fixed route.
For Mr. Biswas it was like returning to the village where he had spent his early years. Only,
now the surrounding darkness and mystery had gone. He knew what lay beyond the sugarcane
fields and where the roads went. They went to villages which were just like The Chase; they went to
ramshackle towns where, perhaps, some store or caf was decorated by his signs.
To such towns the villagers made arduous and infrequent excursions to obtain dry goods, to
make complaints to the police, to appear in court; for The Chase could support neither a dry goods
store nor a police station nor even a school. Its two most important public buildings were the two
rumshops. And it abounded in small food-shops, one of which was Mr. Biswas’s.
Mr. Biswas’s shop was a short, narrow room with a rusty galvanized iron roof. The concrete
floor, barely higher than the earth, was abraded to a pebbly roughness and encrusted with dirt. The
walls leaned and sagged; the concrete plaster had cracked and flaked off in many places, revealing
mud, tapia grass and bamboo strips. The walls shook easily, but the tapia grass and bamboo strips
had given them an astonishing resilience; so that although for the next six years Mr. Biswas never
ceased to feel an anxiety when someone leaned on the o walls or flung sacks of sugar or flour
against them, the walls never fell down, never deteriorated beyond the limberness in which he had
found them.
At the back of the shop there were two rooms with un-plastered mud walls and a roof of old,
rough thatch that extended over an open gallery at one side. The floor of beaten earth had
disintegrated and the chickens of the neighbourhood came there to take dust-baths during the heat
of the day.
The kitchen was a derelict makeshift structure in the yard. It had crooked tree branches for
uprights, assorted bits of corrugated iron for roof, and almost anything for walls: sections of tin,
strips of canvas and bamboo, boards from shop boxes. One wall had a space for a window, but the
rectangular shape that had been intended had become a rhomboid. The window itself, ill-fitting
lengths of unmatched wood held together by two crossbars split by massive nails that had been
hammered back flat and grown rusty, the window itself was rectangular and was unable to fill the
rhomboid vacancy. Though it was small and stood in the open, the kitchen was always dark. The
window by day and the flambeau or fire by night showed that the walls were black and fluffy with
soot, as though a new species of spider had been bred there, with the ability to spin webs as black
and furry as its legs. Everything smelled of woodsmoke.
But there was space. Space to the back, right up to a boundary that was lost amid a tangle of
tall bush, abandoned land called by the villagers and later by Mr. Biswas “the ‘bandon”. There was
more abandoned land to one side; once a well-tilled field, it was now a pasture for those cows of the
village that could feed on its weeds and nettles and razor-sharp grass, wild, scrambling growths.
The Tulsis had bought this unprofitable property on the advice of Seth. He was a member of a
Local Road Board and had received information, later proved to be worthless, that a trunk road was
to be driven through the very spot on which Mr. Biswas’s shop stood.
Mr. Biswas moved from Hanuman House with little trouble. He had little to move: his
clothes, a few books and magazines, his painting equipment. Shama had much more. She had many
clothes; and just before she left, she was given bolts of cloth by Mrs. Tulsi straight from the shelves
of the Tulsi Store. It was Shama, too, who thought of buying pots and pans and cups and plates; and
though she got them at cost price from the Tulsi Store, Mr. Biswas was disturbed to see that his
savings, sign-writing money accumulated during his stay at Hanuman House, had begun to melt
even before he had moved.
Their goods barely filled a donkey-cart, and their arrival at The Chase was noted by a waiting
crowd with pity and some hostility. The hostility came from rival shopkeepers. And Mr. Biswas,
shakily perched on one of Shama’s bundles, with the clang of those cost-price but expensive pans in
his ears, was unable to ignore the hostility of Shama herself. She had kept up her martyr’s attitude
throughout the journey, silently staring at the road through the piquets of the cart, holding on her lap
a box containing a Japanese coffee-set of intricate and fantastic design, part of a consignment the
Tulsi Store had not been able to sell after three years, and given by Seth as a belated wedding
present. Nor did Mr. Biswas fail to notice that The Chase appeared to be managing quite well
without his shop, which had been closed, as he knew, for many months.
“Is the sort of place you could build up,” he said to the carter.
The carter nodded non-committally, looking neither at Mr. Biswas nor at the crowd but
straight at his donkey, and aiming a gentle lash at the animal’s eye.
And Shama sighed: the sigh which now told Mr. Biswas that she thought him stupid, boring
and shaming.
The cart stopped.
“Whoa!” some boys shouted.
Looking stern, preoccupied and, as he hoped, dangerous, Mr. Biswas became very busy,
helping the carter to unload. They carried bundles and boxes through the back rooms smelling of
dust to the dark shop, warm in the late afternoon with the smell of coarse brown sugar and stale
coconut oil. The white lines of light between the boards of the front door came from a bright, open
world; movements inside the shop sounded furtive.
Their possessions, spread out on the counter, didn’t take up much space.
“Only the first load,” Mr. Biswas said to the carter. “Have a pile of other stuff to come.”
The carter said nothing.
“Oh.” Mr. Biswas remembered the carter had to be paid. More money.
The man took the dirty blue dollar-note and left.
“Is the last time he carry anything for me,” Mr. Biswas said. “I could tell him that.”
There was silence in the closed, stuffy shop.
“Is the sort of place you could build up,” Mr. Biswas said.
His eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he looked about him. On a top shelf he saw
some tins, apparently abandoned by the previous shopkeeper. About this person Mr. Biswas now
began to speculate. There was ambition and despair in these tins: their faded labels had been
nibbled by rats and stained by flies; some tins had no labels at all.
He heard the carter shouting at his donkey as the cart turned in the narrow road; villagers gave
advice, boys shouted encouragement, a whip repeatedly cracked, hoofbeats sounded awkward and
irregular; then, with a jangle of harness, a cracking of the whip and a shout, the cart was off,
cheered by the village boys.
Shama started to cry. But this time she didn’t cry silently, with the tears running down from
the expressionless eyes. She sobbed like a child, leaning over the box with the Japanese coffee-set
on the counter. “You wanted this. You wanted to paddle your own canoe. In all my life I never was
so shamed as today. People standing up and laughing. This is what you want to paddle your own
canoe with.” She covered her eyes with one hand and waved at the bundles on the counter with the
other.
He wanted to comfort her. But he needed comfort himself. How lonely the shop was! And
how frightening! He had never thought it would be like this when he found himself in an
establishment of his own. It was late afternoon; Hanuman House would be warm and noisy with
activity. Here he was afraid to disturb the silence, afraid to open the door of the shop, to step into
the light.
And in the end it was Shama who gave him comfort. For presendy she stopped crying, gave a
long, decisive blow to her nose and began sweeping, setting up, putting away. He followed her
about, watching, offering help, glad to be told to do something and enjoying it when she reproved
him for doing it badly.
In his careless retreat the previous tenant had abandoned two articles of furniture to the Tulsis;
these had now passed to Mr. Biswas. In one of the back rooms there was a large, canopy-less cast
iron fourposter whose black enamel paint was chipped and lacklustre.
“Smell,” Shama said, holding a bedboard to Mr. Biswas’s nose. It had the piercing acrid smell
of bedbugs. She doused the boards with kerosene. It wouldn’t kill the bugs, she said. But it would
keep them quiet for the time being.
And for years Mr. Biswas was to know, particularly on a Saturday morning, the smell of
kerosene and bedbugs. The boards changed; the mattress changed; but the bugs remained, following
the fourposter wherever it went, from The Chase to Green Vale to Port of Spain to the house at
Shorthills and, finally, to the house in Sikkim Street, where it nearly filled one of the two bedrooms
on the upper floor.
The other piece of furniture that came with the shop was a kitchen table, small, low, and so
neatly made that it stood, not in the kitchen in the yard, but in a bedroom. It was on this table, after
much dusting and washing and wiping, that Shama placed her clothes and bolts of cloth; the parcel
with the Japanese coffee-set she put below it, on the earth floor. Mr. Biswas no longer thought the
coffee-set, and Shama’s attitude to it, absurd. Feeling grateful to Shama, he felt tender towards her
coffee-set. He was not prepared for such a change in himself; but then he was astonished at the
change in Shama. Till the last she had protested at leaving Hanuman House, but now she behaved
as though she moved into a derelict house every day. Her actions were assertive, wasteful and
unnecessarily noisy. They filled shop and house; they banished silence and loneliness.
And, further miracle, she produced a meal from that kitchen in the yard. He could not look on
it as simply food. For the first time a meal had been prepared in a house which was his own. He felt
abashed; and was glad that Shama did not treat it as an occasion. Only, feeding him at the table in
the bedroom, by the light of a brand-new cost-price oil lamp from the Tulsi Store, she didn’t sigh or
stare or look weary and impatient as she had done in the lotus-decorated long room at Hanuman
House.
In a few weeks the house became cleaner and habitable. The atmosphere of decay and disuse,
while not disappearing, was made to retreat and held in check. Nothing could be done about the
walls of the shop; no amount of washing could remove the smell of oil and sugar; the lower shelves
and the two planks on the concrete floor behind the counter remained black with grease that had
dried, and rough with dust that had stuck. They poured disinfectant everywhere, until they were
almost choked by its fumes. But as the days passed, their zeal abated. They remembered the
previous tenants less and less; and the grime, increasingly familiar, eventually became their own,
and therefore supportable. Only slight improvements were made to the kitchen. “It standing up just
by the grace of God,” Mr. Biswas said. “Pull out one board, and the whole thing tumble down.” The
earth floor of the bedrooms and gallery was mended, packed a little higher and plastered to a
smooth, grey dustlessness. The Japanese coffee-set was taken out of its box and displayed on the
table, where it appeared to be in peril; but Shama said it would remain there only until a better place
was found.
And that was what Mr. Biswas continued to feel about their venture: that it was temporary and
not quite real, and it didn’t matter how it was arranged. He had felt that on the first afternoon; and
the feeling lasted until he left The Chase. Real life was to begin for them soon, and elsewhere. The
Chase was a pause, a preparation.
In the meantime he became a shopkeeper. Selling had seemed to him such an easy way of
making a living he had often wondered why people bothered to do anything else. On market days in
Pagotes, for instance, you could buy a bag of flour, open it, sit down before it with a scoop and a set
of scales on one side; and, ridiculously, people came and bought your flour and put money in your
pocket. It looked such a simple process that Mr. Biswas felt it wouldn’t work if he tried it. But when
he had stocked the shop, using the rest of his savings, and opened his doors, he found that people
did come to him and buy and hand over real money. After every sale in those early days he felt he
had pulled off a deep confidence trick, and had difficulty in hiding his exultation.
He thought of the tins on the top shelf–he had not got around to taking them down–and was as
puzzled by his success as he was delighted by it. At the end of the first month he found he had made
the vast profit of thirty-seven dollars. He knew nothing about keeping books and it was Shama who
had suggested that he should make notes of goods given on credit on squares of brown shop-paper.
It was Shama who suggested that these squares should be spiked. It was Shama who made the
spike. And it was Shama who kept the accounts, writing in her round, stylish, slow Mission-school
hand in a Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook (the words were printed on the cover).
During these weeks the strangeness of their solitude lessened. But they were as yet unused to
their new relationship and though they never quarrelled their talk remained impersonal and
constrained. The solitude embarrassed Mr. Biswas by the intimacy it imposed, especially during the
serving of food. The atmosphere of service and devotion was flattering, but at the same time
unsettling. It strained Mr. Biswas and he was even glad when abruptly, it broke.
One evening Shama said, “We must have a house-blessing ceremony, and get Hari to bless
the shop and house, and have Mai and Uncle and everybody else here.”
He was taken completely by surprise, and lost his temper. “What the hell you think I look
like?” he asked in English. “The Maharajah of Barrackpore? And what the hell for I should get Hari
to come and bless this place? This place? Look for yourself.” He pointed to the kitchen and slapped
the wall of the shop. “Is bad enough as it is. To feed your family on top of all this is really going too
damn far.”
And Shama did something he hadn’t heard for weeks: she sighed, the old weary Shama sigh.
And she said nothing.
In the days that followed he learned something new: how a woman nagged. The very word,
nag, was known to him only from foreign books and magazines. It had puzzled him. Living in a
wife-beating society, he couldn’t understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging
could have any effect. He saw that there were exceptional women, Mrs. Tulsi and Tara, for
example, who could never be beaten. But most of the women he knew were like Sushila, the
widowed Tulsi daughter. She talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived
husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of
Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.
To this class Mr. Biswas belonged. So Shama nagged; and nagged so well that from the first
he knew she was nagging. It amazed him that someone so young should show herself so competent
in such an alien skill. But there were things which should have warned him. She had never run a
house, but at The Chase she had always behaved like an experienced housewife. Then there was her
pregnancy. She took that as easily as if she had borne many children; she never spoke about it, ate
no special foods, made no special preparations, and generally behaved so normally that at times he
forgot she was pregnant.
So Shama nagged. With her gloom and a refusal to speak, first of all; then with a precise,
economical and noisy efficiency. She didn’t ignore Mr. Biswas. She made it clear that she noted his
presence, and that it filled her with despair. At nights, next to him, but without touching him, she
sighed loudly and blew her nose just at those moments when he was dropping off to sleep. She
turned heavily and impatiently from side to side.
For the first two days he pretended not to notice.
On the third day he asked, “What happen to you?”
She didn’t reply, sitting next to him at the table, sighing, watching him while he ate.
He asked again.
She said, “Talk about ungrateful!” and was up and out of the room.
He ate with diminished appetite.
That night Shama blew her nose repeatedly, and turned over in bed.
Mr. Biswas prepared to stick it out.
Then Shama was silent.
Mr. Biswas thought he had won.
Then Shama snuffled, very low, as though ashamed that the sound had escaped her.
Mr. Biswas grew very still, and listened to his own breathing. It sounded regular and
unnatural. He opened his eyes and looked up at the thatched roof. He could make out the rafters and
the loose straws that hung straight down, threatening to fall into his eyes.
Shama groaned and blew her nose loudly, once, twice, three times. Then she got out of the
cast iron fourposter and it rattled. Suddenly silent and energetic, she went out of the room. The
latrine was right at the back of her yard.
When she came back, minutes later, he acknowledged defeat. “What happen, man?” he asked.
“You can’t sleep?”
“I been sleeping sound sound,” she said.
The next morning he said, “All right, send for the old queen and the big boss and Hari and the
gods and everybody else and get the shop bless.”
Shama was determined to do things well. Three labourers worked for three days to put up a
large tent in the yard. It was a simple affair, with bamboo uprights and a roof of coconut branches;
but the bamboos had to be transported from a neighbouring village, and the labourers, after many
aggrieved and unintelligible mutterings about the Workmen’s Compensation Act, had to be paid
extra for climbing the coconut trees to get branches. Enormous quantities of food were bought; and,
to assist in its preparation, sisters began arriving at The Chase three days before the house-blessing
ceremony. With their arrival Mr. Biswas’s protests ceased. He consoled himself with the thought
that not all of the Tulsis would come.
They all came, except Seth, Miss Blackie and the two gods.
“Owad and Shekhar learning,” Mrs. Tulsi said in English, meaning only that the gods were at
school.
She wandered about the yard, opening doors, inspecting, no expression on her face.
Hari, the holy man, who was to be the pundit that day, was just as Mr. Biswas remembered
him, just as soft-spoken and lymphatic. His felt hat sat softly on his head. He greeted Mr. Biswas
without rancour, without pleasure, without interest. Then he went into the bedroom that was
reserved for him and changed into his pundit’s garb, which he had brought in a small cardboard
suitcase. When he emerged as a pundit everyone treated him with a new respect.
Children, most of whom Mr. Biswas could associate with no particular parent, swarmed
everywhere, the girls in stiff satin dresses and with large rayon bows in long, dank hair, the boys in
pantaloons and bright shirts. And there were babies: asleep in mothers’ arms, asleep on blankets and
sacks under the tent, asleep in various corners of the shop; babies crying and being energetically
walked in the yard; babies crawling, babies bawling, babies simply silent; babies performing every
babylike function.
Govind nodded to Mr. Biswas, but didn’t speak, and went and sat in the tent, where he talked
and laughed loudly with the brothers-in-law.
Chinta and Padma asked without warmth after Mr. Biswas’s health. Padma asked because it
was her duty, as Seth’s representative; Chinta asked because Padma had done so. The two women
were together for much of the time, and Mr. Biswas suspected that an equally close relationship
existed between Govind and Seth.
It seemed, too, that Sushila, the childless widow, was enjoying one of her periods of authority.
She had now joined Mrs. Tulsi and they both wandered about, peering and prodding and holding
muted discussions in Hindi.
Mr. Biswas found himself a stranger in his own yard. But was it his own? Mrs. Tulsi and
Sushila didn’t appear to think so. The villagers didn’t think so. They had always called the shop the
Tulsi Shop, even after he had painted a sign and hung it above the door:
The Bonne Esperance Grocery
M. Biswas Prop
Goods at City Prices
With one bedroom reserved for Hari, the other for Mrs. Tulsi, and with the shop full of babies,
Mr. Biswas could retreat nowhere. He stood before the shop, fondling his belly under his shirt and
working out the quarrel he would have with Shama afterwards.
A scampering and a series of cries came from the shop.
Then Sushila’s voice was heard, raised in undoubted authority. “Get away from here. Go and
play in the open. Can’t you see you are waking up the babies? Why do you big children like the
dark so much?”
Every sister was perpetually on the alert for any sign, however slight or veiled, of sexual
inclination among the children.
Mr. Biswas knew the disagreeable rumpus that would follow. He had no taste for it, and
walked away from the shop to the boundary of the lot. Here, under a hedge, he came upon a group
of children playing house.
“You are Mai,” a girl said to another girl. And to a boy, “You are Seth.”
Mr. Biswas withdrew. But the girl–whose litter did she belong to?–saw him and, raising her
voice from the whisper with which games of house should be played, said with unmistakable
malice, “And who will be Mohun? You, Bhoj. You have three-quarter white pants. And you are a
great fighter.”
There was a round of childish laughter which filled Mr. Biswas’s mind with thoughts of
murder, though even as he hurried away he felt some desire to see what Bhoj looked like.
For the last three days, since the arrival of her sisters, Shama had become a Tulsi and a
stranger again. Now she was unapproachable. The ceremony in the tent was about to begin and she
sat in front of Hari, listening to his instructions with bowed head. Her hair was still wet from her
ritual bath and she was dressed in white from top to toe. She looked like someone waiting to be
sacrificed and Mr. Biswas thought he could detect pleasure in the curve of her back. Her status, like
Hari’s, was only temporary; but while the ceremony lasted, it was paramount.
Mr. Biswas didn’t want to witness the ceremony. It meant sitting with the brothers-in-law in
the tent; and he was sure that the sight of Shama’s submissive and exultant back would eventually
infuriate him. Also, it occurred to him that if he kept moving about he might prevent some of the
Tulsi army from looting.
It was then that he thought of the shop.
He nearly ran there. It was dark, with the front doors closed, and he had to be careful. The
shop smelled of babies, who were asleep everywhere: on the counter, flanked by pillows and boxes
to keep them from rolling off; under the counter; on the floor planks behind the counter. Then,
slowly in the darkness, a group of squatting children defined itself in one corner. They were silent
and intent. With equal silence and intentness Mr. Biswas picked his way past the babies to the
counter.
The little group was methodically breaking soda water bottles and extracting the crystal
marbles from the necks. The bottles were wrapped in sacking to muffle the noise. There was a
deposit of eight cents on every bottle. The sweet jars on the bottom shelf were disarrayed. The
Paradise Plums had dwindled substantially. So had the Mintips, a mint sweet with the elasticity and
lastingness of rubber. So had the salted prunes. Many tin-lids had not been screwed on properly.
Mr. Biswas put out a hand to straighten a lid. It felt sticky. He dropped it. A baby bawled, the
children in the corner became alert, and Mr. Biswas shouted, “Get out of here before I lay my hand
on some of you.” And at the same time, with the dexterity of the practised shopkeeper, he lifted the
flap of the counter and opened the little door, almost in one action, and was on the group in the
corner.
He lifted a boy by the collar. The boy bawled, the girls with him bawled, the babies in the
shop bawled.
From outside a woman asked, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
Mr. Biswas dropped the boy he had seized, and the boy ran outside, screaming louder than the
babies.
“Uncle Mohun beat me. Ma, Uncle Mohun beat me.”
Another woman, doubtless the mother, said, “But he wouldn’t touch you for nothing.” Her
tone indicated that Mr. Biswas wouldn’t dare. “You must have been doing something.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing, Ma,” the boy wailed in English.
“He wasn’t doing nothing, Ma.” This was from one of the girls. Mr. Biswas knew her: a
dumpy little thing, with big contemptuous eyes and full, pendulous lips; she was capable of
fantastic physical contortions and often performed for visitors at Hanuman House.
“Blasted liar!” Mr. Biswas said. He ran out of the shop, past a woman who was coming,
cooing, to a bawling baby. “Wasn’t doing nothing? And who break up all those soda water bottles?”
In the tent Hari droned imperturbably on. Shama remained bowed in her white cocoon. The
brothers-in-law sat on their blankets, reverentially still.
Mr. Biswas was lucid enough to hope that he wasn’t antagonizing a father.
Padma went into the shop in her slow way and came out and said judicially. “Some bottles
have been broken.”
“And is eight cents a bottle,” Mr. Biswas said. “Wasn’t doing nothing!”
The mother of the boy, suddenly enraged, flew to a hibiscus bush and began breaking off a
switch. It was a tough bush and she had to bend the switch back and forth several times. Torn leaves
fell on the ground.
The boy’s bawls were now touched with genuine anguish.
The mother broke two switches on the boy, speaking as she beat. “This will teach you not to
meddle with things that don’t belong to you. This will teach you not to provoke people who don’t
make any allowances for children.” She caught sight of the marks left on the boy’s collar by Mr.
Biswas’s fingers, sticky from the tin-lid. “And this will teach you not to let big people make your
clothes dirty. This will teach you that they don’t have to wash them. You are a big man. You know
right . You know wrong . You are not a child. That is why I am beating you as though you are a
big man and can take a big man’s blows.”
The beating had ceased to be a simple punishment and had become a ritual. Sisters came out
to witness, rocking crying babies in their arms, and said without urgency, “You will damage the
boy, Sumati.” And: “Stop it now, Sumati. You have beaten him enough.”
Sumati continued to beat, and didn’t stop talking.
In the tent Hari intoned. From the set of Shama’s back Mr. Biswas could divine her
displeasure.
“House-blessing party!” Mr. Biswas said.
The beating went on.
“Is just a form of showing-off,” Mr. Biswas said. He had seen enough of these beatings to
know that later it would be said admiringly, “Sumati beats her children really well”; and that the
sisters would say to their children, “Do you want to be beaten the way Sumati beat her son that day
at The Chase?”
The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed
her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, “Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really
badly today”; then to the boy, “Come, look how you are making him cry.” The whimpering boy
kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.
“Good!” Sumati said, tears in her eyes. “Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the
soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.”
“I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Nobody asked,” Sumati said, to no one in particular. “I am just saying that everybody is now
satisfied.”
She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women and girls. The boy sat
among the men.
The road was now lined with villagers and a few outsiders as well. They had not been
attracted by the flogging, though that had encouraged the children of the village to gather a little
earlier than might have been expected. They came for the food that would be distributed after the
ceremony. Among these expectant uninvited guests Mr. Biswas noticed two of the village
shopkeepers.
The cooking was being done, under the superintendence of Sushila, over an open fire-hole in
the yard. Sisters stirred enormous black cauldrons brought for the occasion from Hanuman House.
They sweated and complained but they were happy. Though there was no need for it, some had
stayed awake all the previous night, peeling potatoes, cleaning rice, cutting vegetables, singing,
drinking coffee. They had prepared bin after bin of rice, bucket upon bucket of lentils and
vegetables, vats of tea and coffee, volumes of chapattis.
Mr. Biswas had given up trying to work out the cost. “Just going to leave me a damn pauper,”
he said. He walked along the hibiscus hedge, plucked leaves, chewed them and spat them out.
“You have a nice little property here, Mohun.”
It was Mrs. Tulsi, looking tired after her rest on the cast iron fourposter. She had used the
English word “property”; it had an acquisitive, self-satisfied flavour; he would have preferred it if
she had said “shop” or “place”.
“Nice?” he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.
“Very nice little property.”
“Walls falling down in the shop.”
“They wouldn’t fall.”
“Roof leaking in the bedroom.”
“It doesn’t rain all the time.”
“And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.”
“The kitchen looks all right to me.”
“And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.”
“What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?”
“I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.”
“Look,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. “You don’t want an extra room at all.
You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra
room.”
He looked at her. She was in earnest.
“Take them away in the morning,” she said, “and you have your gallery again.”
“Sugarsack, eh?”
“Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.”
I would like to bury you in one, Mr. Biswas thought. He said, “You going to send me some of
these sugarsacks?”
“You’re a shopkeeper,” she said. “You have more than me.”
“Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a
coal barrel. You didn’t know that?”
She was too surprised to speak.
“I don’t know why they still building houses,” Mr. Biswas said. “Nobody don’t want a house
these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just
get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six
coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.”
Mrs. Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she
called, “Sushila.”
“And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,” Mr. Biswas said. “No
need to bring him all the way to The Chase.”
Sushila came and, giving Mr. Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs. Tulsi. “What has
happened, Mai?”
In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs. Tulsi’s words.
Sushila led Mrs. Tulsi to the tent.
Mr. Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough
light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs.
Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was
mingled with the smell of Mrs. Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil,
ammonia. He didn’t feel a small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on
the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.
He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.
But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But
go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a
labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more
than that?
He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no
ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes
and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the
earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the
fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.
“Well, you make me really proud of you today,” Shama said.
And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at
The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.
Shama sighed.
He got up. “The house done bless?”
She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks
on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.
“What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.”
She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing or speaking, left the room.
He heard her making excuses for him.
“He has a headache.”
He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their
husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.
He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss
his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.
But no one even said, “Give him an aspirin.”
Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.
The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr. Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs
in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr. Biswas had fed sold his
establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The
Chase.
“Well, one thing sure,” Mr. Biswas said. “The house bless. You think everybody was just
waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?”
“You give too much credit,” Shama said. “You must get those people to pay you.”
“You want me to go and beat them?”
And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, “What you want to bust
your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.”
She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.
“I don’t want to know,” Mr. Biswas said. “I just don’t want to know. How about getting the
house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?”
She had a theory. “The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the
store at home.”
“You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have
the sort efface of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.” He got a mirror and studied his face.
“That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose–I mean, just
supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.”
She looked.
“All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What
you would say I was?”
She couldn’t say.
“That is the whole blasted trouble,” he said. “I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper,
lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer–I don’t look like any of them.”
The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.
Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and
down the staircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown,
it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the housekeeper, and now the mother. With Mr.
Biswas she continued to be brisk, uncomplaining and almost unaware of her pregnancy. But when
she was visited by her sisters, who made it plain that the pregnancy was their business, Tulsi
business, and had little to do with Mr. Biswas, a change came over her. She did not cease to be
uncomplaining; but she also became someone who not so much suffered as endured. She fanned
herself and spat often, which she never did when she was alone; but pregnant women were
supposed to behave in this way. It was not that she was trying to impress the sisters and get their
sympathy; she was anxious not to disappoint them or let herself down. And when her feet began to
swell, Mr. Biswas wanted to say, “Well, you are complete and normal now. Everything is going as
it should. You are just like your sisters.” For there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected
from life: to be taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the
established emotions: joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hardship, grief at a death.
Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern of sensation. Grief and joy, both equally awaited,
were one. For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was
a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister,
wife, mother, widow.
Secretly, with the help of her sisters, the baby clothes were made. A number of Mr. Biswas’s
floursacks disappeared; later they turned up as diapers. And the time came for Shama to go to
Hanuman House. Sushila and Chinta came to fetch her; the pretence was still maintained that Mr.
Biswas didn’t know why.
Then he discovered that Shama had made preparations for him as well. His clothes had been
washed and darned; and he was moved, though not surprised, to find on the kitchen shelf little
squares of shop-paper on which, in her Mission-school script that always deteriorated after the first
two or three lines, Shama had pencilled recipes for the simplest meals, writing with a disregard for
grammar and punctuation which he thought touching. How quaint, too, to find phrases he had only
heard her speak committed to paper in this handwriting! In her instructions for the boiling of rice,
for example, she told him to “throw in just a little pinch of salt”–he could see her bunching her long
fingers–and to use “the blue enamel pot without the handle”. How often, crouched before the
chulha fire, she had said to him, “Just hand me the blue pot without the handle.”
During the idle hours in the shop he had begun to choose names, mostly male ones: he never
thought anything else likely. He wrote them on shop-paper, rolled them on his tongue, and tried
them out on customers.
“Krishnadhar Haripratap Gokulnath Damodar Biswas. What do you think of that for a name?
K. H. G. D. Biswas. Or what about Krishnadhar Gokul nath Haripratap Damodar Biswas. K. G. H.
D.”
“You are not leaving much room for the pundit to give the child a name.”
“No pundit is giving any name to any child of mine.”
And on the back endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare , a work of fatiguing
illegibility, he wrote the names in large letters, as though his succession had already been settled.
He would have used Bell’s Standard Elocutionist , still his favourite reading, if it had not suffered
so much from the kick he had given it in the long room at Hanuman House; the covers hung loose
and the endpapers had been torn, exposing the khaki-coloured boards. He had bought the Collins
Clear-Type Shakespeare for the sake of Julius Caesar , parts of which he had declaimed at Lai’s
school. Every other play defeated him; the volume remained virtually unread and now, as a
repository of the family records, proved to be a mistake. The endpaper blotted atrociously.
And the baby was a girl. But it was born at the correct time; it was born without difficulty; it
was healthy; and Shama was absolutely well. He expected no less from her. He closed the shop and
cycled to Hanuman House, and found that his daughter had already been named.
“Look at Savi,” Shama said.
“Savi?”
They were in Mrs. Tulsi’s room, the Rose Room, where all the sisters spent their
confinements.
“It is a nice name,” Shama said.
Nice name; when all the way from The Chase he had been working on names, and had
decided on Sarojini Lakshmi Kamala Devi.
“Seth and Hari chose it.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Jerking his chin towards the baby, he asked in English, “They
had it register?”
On the marble topped table next to the bed there was a sheet of paper under a brass plate. She
handed that to him.
“Well! I glad she register. You know the government and nobody else did want to believe that
I was even born. People had to swear and sign all sort of paper.”
“All of we was register,” Shama said.
“All of all-you would be register.” He looked at the certificate. “Savi? But I don’t see the
name here at all. I only see Basso.”
She widened her eyes. “Shh!”
“I not going to let anybody call my child Basso.”
“Shh!”
He understood. Basso was the real name of the baby, Savi the calling name. The real name of
a person could be used to damage that person, whereas the calling name had no validity and was
only a convenience. He was relieved he wouldn’t have to call his daughter Basso. Still, what a
name!
“Hari make that one up, eh? The holy ghost.”
“And Seth.”
“Trust the pundit and the big thug.”
“Man, what you doing?”
He was scribbling hard on the birth certificate.
“Look.” At the top of the certificate he had written: Real calling name : Lakshmi. Signed by
Mohun Biswas, father . Below that was the date.
They both felt that a government document, which should have remained inviolate, had been
challenged.
He enjoyed her alarm, and looked at her closely for the first time since he had come. Her long
hair was loose and spread about her pillow. To look at him she had to press her chin into her neck.
“You got a double chin,” he said. She didn’t reply.
Suddenly he jumped up. “What the hell is this?”
“Show me.”
He showed her the certificate. “Look. Occupation of father. Labourer. Labourer! Me! Where
your family get all this bad blood, girl?”
“I didn’t see that.”
“Trust Seth. Look. Name of informant: R. N. Seth. Occupation: Estate Manager.”
“I wonder why he do that.”
“Look, the next time you want a informant, eh, just let me know. Calling Lakshmi Basso and
Savi. Hello, Lakshmi. Lakshmi, is me, your father, occupation–occupation what, girl? Painter?”
“It make you sound like a house painter.”
“Sign-painter? Shopkeeper? God, not that!” He took the certificate and began scribbling.
“Proprietor,” he said, passing the certificate to her.
“But you can’t call yourself a proprietor. The shop belong to Mai.”
“You can’t call me a labourer either.”
“They could bring you up for this.”
“Let them try.”
“You better go now, man.”
The baby was stirring.
“Hello, Lakshmi.”
“Savi.”
“Basso.”
“Shh!”
“Talk about the old thug. The old scorpion, if you ask me. The old Scorpio.”
He left the dark room with its close medicinal smells, its basins and its pile of diapers and
came out into the drawing-room where at one end the two tall chairs stood like thrones. He went
through the wooden bridge to the verandah of the old upstairs where Hari usually sat reading his
unwieldy scriptures. Shyly, he came down the stairs into the hall, anticipating much attention as the
father of the newest baby in Hanuman House. No one particularly looked at him. The hall was full
of children eating gloomily. Among them he recognized the contortionist and the girl who had been
running the house-game at The Chase. He smelled sulphur and saw that the children were not eating
food but a yellow powder mixed with what looked like condensed milk.
He asked, “What is that, eh?”
The contortionist grimaced and said, “Sulphur and condensed milk.”
“Food getting expensive, eh?”
“Is for the eggzema,” the house-player said.
She dipped her finger in condensed milk, in sulphur, then put her finger in her mouth.
Hurriedly she repeated the action.
Mrs. Tulsi had come out of the black kitchen doorway.
“Sulphur and condensed milk,” Mr. Biswas said.
“To sweeten it,” Mrs. Tulsi said. Again she had forgiven him.
“Sweeten!” the contortionist whispered loudly. “My foot.” Her achievements gave her
unusual licence.
“Very good for the eczema.” Mrs. Tulsi sat down next to the contortionist, took up her plate
and shook back the sulphur from the rim, over which the contortionist had been steadily spilling
sulphur on to the table. “Have you seen your daughter, Mohun?”
“Lakshmi?”
“Lakshmi?”
“Lakshmi. My daughter. That is the name I choose.”
“Shama looks well.” Mrs. Tulsi brushed the spilled sulphur off the table on to her palm and
shook the palm over the condensed milk, which the contortionist had so far kept virgin. “I have put
her in the Rose Room. My room.”
Mr. Biswas said nothing.
Mrs. Tulsi patted the bench. “Come and sit here, Mohun.”
He sat beside her.
“The Lord gives,” Mrs. Tulsi said abruptly in English.
Concealing his surprise, Mr. Biswas nodded. He knew Mrs. Tulsi’s philosophizing manner.
Slowly, and with the utmost solemnity, she made a number of simple, unconnected statements; the
effect was one of puzzling profundity.
“Everything comes, bit by bit,” she said. “We must forgive. As your father used to say”–she
pointed to the photographs on the wall–“what is for you is for you. What is not for you is not for
you.”
Against his will Mr. Biswas found himself listening gravely and nodding in agreement.
Mrs. Tulsi sniffed and pressed her veil to her nose. “A year ago, who would have thought that
you would be sitting here, in this hall, with these children, as my son-in-law and a father? Life is
full of these surprises. But they are not really surprising. You are responsible for a life now,
Mohun.” She began to cry. She put her hand on Mr. Biswas’s shoulder, not to comfort him, but
urging him to comfort her. “I let Shama have my room. The Rose Room. I know that you are
worried about the future. Don’t tell me. 1 know.” She patted his shoulder.
He was trapped by her mood. He forgot the children eating sulphur and condensed milk, and
shook his head as if to admit that he had thought profoundly and with despair of the future.
Having trapped him in the mood, she removed her hand, blew her nose and dried her eyes.
“Whatever happens, you keep on living. Whatever happens. Until the Lord sees fit to take you
away.” The last sentence was in English; it took him aback, and broke the spell. “As He did with
your dear father. But until that time comes, no matter how they starve you or how they treat you,
they can never kill you.”
They, Mr. Biswas thought, who are they?
Then Seth stamped into the hall with his muddy bluchers and the children applied themselves
with zeal to the sulphur powder.
“Mohun,” Seth said. “See your daughter? You surprise me, man.”
The contortionist giggled. Mrs. Tulsi smiled.
You traitor, Mr. Biswas thought, you old she-fox traitor.
“Well, you are a big man now, Mohun,” Seth said. “Husband and father. Don’t start behaving
like a little boy again. The shop gone bust yet?”
“Give it a little time,” Mr. Biswas said, standing up. “After all, is only about four months
since Hari bless it.”
The contortionist laughed; for the first time Mr. Biswas felt charitably towards this girl.
Encouraged, he added, “You think we could get him to un-bless it?”
There was more laughter.
Seth shouted for his wife and food.
At the mention of food the children looked up longingly.
“No food for none of all-you today,” Seth said. “This will teach you to play in dirt and give
yourself eggzema.”
Mrs. Tulsi was at Mr. Biswas’s side. She was solemn again. “It comes bit by bit.” She was
whispering now, for sisters were coming out of the kitchen with brass plates and dishes. “You never
thought, I expect, that your own first child would be born in a place like this.”
He shook his head.
“Remember, they can’t kill you.”
That “they” again.
“Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “So it have three in the family now.”
She was warned by his tone.
“Send me a barrel,” he said loudly. “A small coal barrel.”
He came out through the side gate and wheeled his cycle past the arcade, which was already
filling up with the evening crowd of old India-born men who came there to smoke and talk. He
cycled to Misir’s rickety little wooden house and called at the lighted window.
Misir pushed his head past the lace curtain and said, “Just the man I want to see. Come in.”
Misir said he had packed his wife and children off to his mother-in-law. Mr. Biswas guessed
the reason to be a quarrel or a pregnancy.
“Been working like hell without them, too,” Misir said. “Writing stories.”
“For the Sentinel ?”
“Short stories,” Misir said with his old impatience. “Just sit down and listen.”
Misir’s first story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving.
His five children were starving; his wife was having another baby. It was December and the shops
were full of food and toys. On Christmas eve the man got a job. Going home that evening, he was
knocked down and killed by a motorcar that didn’t stop.
“Helluva thing,” Mr. Biswas said. “I like the part about the car not stopping.”
Misir smiled, and said fiercely, “But life is like that. Is not a fairy-story. No
once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-rajah nonsense. Listen to this one.”
Misir’s second story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving.
To keep his large family he began selling his possessions, and finally he had nothing left but a
two-shilling sweepstake ticket. He didn’t want to sell it, but one of his children fell dangerously ill
and needed medicine. He sold the ticket for a shilling and bought medicine. The child died; the
ticket he had sold won the sweepstake.
“Helluva thing,” Mr. Biswas said. “What happen?”
“To the man? Why you asking me ? Use your imagination.”
“Hell, hell, helluva thing.”
“People should know about these things,” Misir said. “Know about life. You should start
writing some stories yourself
“I just don’t have the time, boy. Have a little property in The Chase now.” Mr. Biswas
paused, but Misir didn’t react. “Married man, too, you know. Responsibilities.” He paused again.
“Daughter.”
“God!” Misir exclaimed in disgust. “God !”
“Just born.”
Misir shook his head, sympathizing. “Cat in bag, cat in bag. That is all we get from this
cat-in-bag business.”
Mr. Biswas changed the subject. “What about the Aryans?”
“Why you asking? You don’t really care. Nobody don’t care. Just tell them a few fairy-stories
and they happy. They don’t want to face facts. And this Shivlochan is a damn fool. You know they
send Pankaj Rai back to India? Sometimes I stop and wonder what happening to him over there. I
suppose the poor man in rags, starving in some gutter, can’t get a job or anything. You know, you
could make a good story out of Pankaj.”
“Just what I was going to say. The man was a purist.”
“A born purist.”
“Misir, you still working for the Sentinel ?”
“Blasted cent a line still. Why?”
“A damn funny thing happen today. You know what I see? A pig with two heads.”
“Where?”
“Right here, Hanuman House. From their estate.”
“But Hindus like the Tulsis wouldn’t keep pigs.”
“You would be surprised. Of course it was dead.”
For all his reforming instincts, Misir was clearly disappointed and upset. “Anything for the
money these days. Still, is a story. Going to telephone it in straight away.”
And when he left Misir, Mr. Biswas said, “Occupation labourer. This will show them.”
It would be three weeks before Shama returned to The Chase. He put up a hammock for the
baby in the gallery and waited. The shop and the back rooms became increasingly disordered, and
felt cold, like an abandoned camp. Yet as soon as Shama came with Lakshmi–“Her name is Savi,”
Shama insisted, and Savi it remained–those rooms again became the place where he not only lived,
but had status without having to assert his rights or explain his worth.
He immediately began complaining of the very things that pleased him most. Savi cried, and
he spoke as though she were one of Shama’s indulgences. Meals were late, and he exhibited an
annoyance which concealed the joy he felt that there was someone to cook meals with him in mind.
To these outbursts Shama didn’t reply, as she would have done before. She was morose herself, as
though she preferred this bond to the bond of sentimentality.
He liked to watch when the baby was bathed. Shama did this expertly; she might have been
bathing babies for years. Her left arm and hand supported the baby’s back and wobbly head; her
right hand soaped and washed; finally there was the swift, gentle gesture which transferred the baby
from basin to towel. He marvelled that someone who had come out of Hanuman House with hands
torn by housework could express so much gentleness through those same hands. Afterwards Savi
was rubbed with coconut oil and her limbs exercised, to certain cheerful rhymes. The same things
had been done to Mr. Biswas and Shama when they were babies; the same rhymes had been said;
and possibly the ritual had been evolved a thousand years before.
The anointing was repeated in the evening, when the sun had dropped and the surrounding
bush had begun to sing. And it was at this time, some six months later, that Moti came to the shop
and rapped hard on the counter.
Moti did not belong to the village. He was a small worried-looking man with grey hair and
bad teeth. He was dressed in a dingy clerkish way. His dirty shirt sat neatly on him and the creases
on his trousers could just be seen. In his shirt pocket he carried a fountain pen, a stunted pencil and
pieces of soiled paper, the equipment and badge of the rural literate.
He asked nervously for a pennyworth of lard.
Mr. Biswas’s Hindu instincts didn’t permit him to stock lard. “But we have butter,” he said,
thinking of the tall smelly tin full of red, runny, rancid butter.
Moti shook his head and took off his bicycle clips. “Just give me a cent Paradise Plums.”
Mr. Biswas gave him three in a square of white paper.
Moti didn’t go away. He put a Paradise Plum in his mouth and said, “I am glad you don’t
stock lard. I respect you for it.” He paused and, closing his eyes, crushed the Paradise Plum between
his jaws. “I am glad to see a man in your position not giving up his religion for the sake of a few
cents. Do you know that these days some Hindu shopkeepers are actually selling salt beef with their
own hands? Just for the few extra cents.”
Mr. Biswas knew, and regretted the squeamishness which prevented him from doing the
same.
“And look at that other thing,” Moti said, talking through the crushed Paradise Plum. “Did
you hear about the pig?”
“The Tulsi pig? Doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“Still, the blessing is that not everyone is like that. You, for instance. And Seebaran. Do you
know Seebaran?”
“Seebaran?”
“Don’t know Seebaran! L. S. Seebaran? The man who has been handling practically all the
work in the Petty Civil.”
“Oh, him,” Mr. Biswas said, still in the dark.
“Very strict Hindu. And one of the best lawyers here too, I can tell you. We should be proud
of him. The man who was here before you–what’s his name?–anyway, the man before you had a lot
to thank Seebaran for. He would be a pauper today if it hadn’t been for Seebaran.”
Moti put another Paradise Plum in his mouth and absently considered the meagrely filled
shelves. Mr. Biswas followed Mod’s gaze, which came to rest on the tins with half-eaten labels, left
there by the man Seebaran had assisted.
“So everybody going to Dookhie, eh?” Moti said, more familiar now, and speaking in
English. Dookhie was the newest shopkeeper in The Chase. “Is a shame. Is a shame the way some
people spend their whole life living on credit. Is a form of robbery. Take Mungroo. You know
Mungroo?”
Mr. Biswas knew him well.
“A man like Mungroo should be in jail,” Moti said.
“I think so too.”
“Is not,” Moti said judiciously, closing his eyes and cracking the Paradise Plum, “as if he was
a pauper and can’t afford to pay. Mungroo richer than you and me could ever hope to be, you hear.”
This was news to Mr. Biswas.
“Man should be in jail,” Moti repeated.
Mr. Biswas was about to say that he hadn’t been fooled by Mungroo when Moti said, “He
don’t rob the rude and crude shopkeepers, people like himself. He frighten they give him a good
dose of licks. No, he does look for nice people with nice soft heart, and is them he does rob.
Mungroo see you, he think you look nice, and next day his wife come round for two cents this and
three cents that, and she forget that she ain’t got no money, and if you could wait till next pay day.
Well, you wrap up the goods in good strong paper-bag, you send she home happy, and you sit down
and wait till next day. Next pay day Mungroo forget. His wife forget. They too busy killing chicken
and buying rum to remember you. Two-three days later, eh-eh, wife suddenly remember you. She
bawling again. She want more trust. Don’t tell me about Mungroo. I know him too good. Man
should be in jail, if anybody had the guts to throw him there.”
The account was telescoped and dramatized, but Mr. Biswas recognized its truth. He felt
exposed, and said nothing.
“Just show me your accounts,” Moti said. “Just to see how much Mungroo owe you.”
Mr. Biswas took down the spike from the nail between the shelves where it hung above a
faded advertisement for Cydrax, a beverage which had not caught the village’s fancy. The spike
was now a tall, feathery, multi-coloured brush, with the papers at the bottom as brittle and curling as
dead leaves.
“Pappa!” Moti said, and became graver and graver as he looked through the papers. He could
not look very far because to get at the lower papers he would have had to remove those at the top
altogether. He turned away from Mr. Biswas and contemplated the blackness outside, staring past
the doorway against which the rear wheel of his decrepit bicycle could be seen. Sadly he sucked his
Paradise Plum. “Pity you don’t know Seebaran. Seebaran woulda fix you up in two twos. He help
out the man before you. Otherwise the man would be a pauper now, man. A pauper. Is a funny
thing, but you don’t expect to find people getting fat and rich on credit while the poor shopkeeper,
who give the credit, not getting enough to eat, wearing rags, watching his children starve, watching
them sick.”
Mr. Biswas, seeing himself as the hero of one of Misir’s stories, could scarcely hide his alarm.
“All right, then, man.” Moti fixed his bicycle clips around his ankles. “I got to go. Thanks for
the chat. I hope everything go all right with you.”
“But you know Seebaran,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Know him, yes. But I don’t know whether I could just go and ask him to help out a friend of
mine. Busy man, you know. Handling nearly all the work in the Petty Civil.”
“Still, you could tell him?”
“Yes,” Moti said, without conviction. “I could tell him. But Seebaran is a big man. You
can’t.go troubling him with just one or two little things.”
Mr. Biswas brushed his hand up and down the papers on the spike. “It have a lot of work here
for him,” he said aggressively. “You tell him.”
“All right. I go tell him.” Moti got on his cycle. “But I ain’t promising nothing.”
Savi was asleep when Mr. Biswas went to the back room.
“Going to settle Mungroo and the rest of them,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “Putting Seebaran
on their tail.”
“Who is Seebaran?”
“Who is Seebaran! You mean you don’t know Seebaran? The man who handling practically
all the work in the Petty Civil.”
“I know all that. I hear what the man was saying too.”
“Why the hell you ask me then for?”
“You don’t think you better get advice before you start bringing up people?”
“Advice? Who from? The old thug and the old she-fox? I know they know everything. You
don’t have to tell me that. But they know law?”
“Seth bring up a lot of people.”
“And every time he bring somebody up, he lose. You don’t have to tell me that either.
Everybody in Arwacas know about Seth and the people he bring up. He don’t know everything.”
“He used to study doctor. Doctor or druggist.”
“Used to study doctor! Horse-doctor, if you ask me. He look like a doctor to you? You ever
look at his hands? Fat, thick. Can’t even hold a pencil properly.”
“He cut open that boil Chanrouti had the other day.”
“And yes. That is another thing I want to tell you, eh. In advance. In advance . I don’t want
Seth cutting open any boil on any of my children. And I don’t want him prescribing any blasted
sulphur and condensed milk for any of them either.”
Mungroo was the leader of the village stick-fighters. He was a tall, wiry, surly man, made
ferocious in appearance by a large handlebar moustache, for which the villagers called him Moush,
then Moach. As a stickman he was a champion. He had reach and skill, and his responses were
miraculous. He converted a parry into a lunge so fluently it seemed to be a single action. He fought
every duel as though he had rehearsed its every development. It was Mungroo who had organized
the young men of The Chase into a fighting band, ready to defend the honour of the village on the
days of the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein. Under his direction and in his yard they
practised assiduously in the evenings by the light of flambeaux. The village boys went to watch this
evening practice. So, despite Shama’s disapproval, did Mr. Biswas.
As much as the game he liked the making of the sticks. Designs were cut into the bark of the
poui , which was then roasted in a bonfire; the burnt bark was peeled off, leaving the design burnt
into the white wood. There was no scent as pleasant as that of barely roasted poui : faint, yet so
lasting it seemed to come from afar, from some immeasurable depth captive within the wood: as
faint as the scent of the pouis Raghu roasted in the village like this, in a yard like this, in a bonfire
like this: bringing sensations, not pictures, of an evening meal being cooked over a fire that shone
on a mud wall and kept out the night, of cool, new, unused mornings, of rain muffled on a thatched
roof and warmth below it: sensations as faint as the scent of the poui itself, but sadly evanescent,
refusing to be seized or to be translated into a concrete memory.
Afterwards, the sticks, their heads carved, were soaked in coconut oil in bamboo cylinders, to
give them greater strength and resilience. Then Mungroo took the sticks to an old stickman he
knew, to have them “mounted” with the spirit of a dead Spaniard. So that the ritual ended in
romance, awe and mystery. For the Spaniards, Mr. Biswas knew, had surrendered the island one
hundred years before, and their descendants had disappeared; yet they had left a memory of reckless
valour, and this memory had passed to people who came from another continent and didn’t know
what a Spaniard was, people who, in their huts of mud and grass where time and distance were
obliterated, still frightened their children with the name of Alexander, of whose greatness they knew
nothing.
By profession Mungroo was a roadmender. He preferred to say that he worked for the
government, and he preferred not to work at all. He made it plain that because he defended the
honour of the village, the village owed him a living. He exacted contributions for pitch-oil for the
flambeaux, for the “mounting” fees, and for the expensive costumes the stick-fighters wore on days
of battle. At first Mr. Biswas contributed willingly. Then Mungroo, the better to devote himself to
his art, abandoned the road-gang for weeks at a time and lived on credit from Mr. Biswas and other
shopkeepers. Mr. Biswas admired Mungroo. He felt it would be disloyal to refuse Mungroo credit,
unbecoming to remind him of his debts, and dangerous to do either. Mungroo became steadily more
demanding. Mr. Biswas complained to other customers; they told Mungroo. Mungroo didn’t reply,
as Mr. Biswas had feared, with violence, but with a dignity which, though it struck Mr. Biswas as
hollow, hurt him as deeply as the silences and sighs of Shama. Mungroo refused to speak to Mr.
Biswas and spat, casually, whenever he passed the shop. Mungroo’s bills remained unpaid; and Mr.
Biswas lost a few more customers.
Earlier than Mr. Biswas had expected, Moti returned and said, “You are a lucky man.
Seebaran has decided to help you. I told him you were a friend of mine and a good Hindu, and he’s
a very strict Hindu himself, as you know. He is going to help you. Even though he’s busy.” He took
out the papers from his shirt pocket, found the one he wanted and slapped it down on the counter.
At the top a mauve stamp, slightly askew, said that L. S. Seebaran was a solicitor and conveyancer.
Below that there were many dotted lines between printed sentences. “Seebaran going to full up
those for you as soon as he get your papers,” Moti said, using English, the language of the law.
Unless this sum , Mr. Biswas read with a thrill, together with One Dollar and Twenty Cents
($1 ,020), the cost of this letter, is paid within ten days, legal proceedings shall be instituted against
you . And there was another dotted line below that, where L. S. Seebaran was to sign himself yours
faithfully.
“Powerful, powerful, man,” Mr. Biswas said. “Legal proceedings, eh. I didn’t know it was so
easy to bring people up.”
Moti gave a knowing little grunt.
“One dollar and twenty cents, the cost of this letter,” Mr. Biswas said. “You mean I don’t
even have to pay that?”
“Not with Seebaran fighting your case for you.”
“One dollar and twenty cents. You mean Seebaran getting that just for fulling up those dotted
lines? Education, boy. It have nothing like a profession.”
“You is your own boss, if you is a professional man,” Moti said, his voice touched with a
remote sadness.
“But one twenty, man. Five minutes’ writing for one twenty.”
“You forgetting that Seebaran had to spend years and years studying all sort of big and heavy
books before they allow him to send out papers like this.”
“You know, the thing to do is to have three sons. Make one a doctor, one a dentist, and one a
lawyer.”
“Nice little family. If you have the sons. And if you have the money. They don’t give trust in
those places.”
Mr. Biswas brought out Shama’s accounts. Moti asked to see the credit slips again, and his
face fell as he looked through them. “A lot of these ain’t signed,” he said.
Mr. Biswas had for long thought it discourteous to ask his creditors to do so. He said, “But
they wasn’t signed the last time either.”
Moti gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t worry. I know cases where Seebaran recover people
money even without paper or anything. But is a lot of work here, you know. You got to show
Seebaran that you serious.”
Mr. Biswas went to the drawer below the shelves. The drawer was large but not heavy, and
pulled out in an easy, awkward way; the wood inside was oily but surprisingly white. “A dollar and
twenty cents?” he said.
A throat was cleared. Shama’s.
“Maharajin ,” Moti said.
There was no reply.
Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “One twenty?” he repeated, rattling the coins in the drawer.
Moti said unhappily, “You can’t give a man like Seebaran one twenty to fight a case for you.”
“Five,” Mr. Biswas said.
“That would be good,” Moti said, as though he had hoped to get ten.
“Two,” Mr. Biswas said, walking briskly to the counter and laying down a red note.
“Is all right,” Moti said. “Don’t bother to count it.”
“And one is three.” Mr. Biswas put down a blue note. “And one is four. And one is five.”
“Five,” Moti said.
“Tell Seebaran I send that.”
Moti put the notes in his side pocket and Shama’s Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook in his hip
pocket. He fixed on his bicycle clips and, looking up, said, “Maharajin ,” directing a brief smile
over Mr. Biswas’s shoulder. Then, briskly, not looking back, he wheeled his shaky bicycle across
the yellow dirt yard, dusty and cracked, with here and there a bleached and flattened Anchor
cigarette packet. “Right,” he called from the road, hopping on the saddle and pedalling rapidly
away.
“Right, man, Moti!” Mr. Biswas called back.
He remained where he was, palms pressed against the edge of the counter, staring at the road,
at the mango tree and the side wall of the hut in the lot obliquely opposite, and the sugarcane fields
stretching away with an occasional blob of trees, to the low hills of the Central Range.
“All right!” he said. “Somebody turn you into a statue?”
Shama sighed.
“I suppose I is my own boss.”
“And a professional man,” she said.
“Shoulda give him ten dollars.”
“Is not too late. Why you don’t empty the drawer and run after him?”
And having stimulated his rage and his appetite for argument, she left the doorway and went
to the back room, where after much thumping and sighing she began to sing a popular Hindi song:
Slowly, slowly,
Brothers and sisters,
Bear his corpse to the water’s edge.
He didn’t have the Hindu delight in tragedy and the details of death, and he had often asked
Shama not to sing this cremation song. Now he had to listen while she sang with sweet
lugubriousness to the end. And when, fretted to defeat, he went to the back room, he found Shama,
in her best satin bodice and most elaborately worked veil, putting bootees on a fully dressed Savi.
“Hello !” he said.
Shama tied one bootee and slipped on the other.
“Going somewhere?”
She tied the other bootee.
At last she said in Hindi, “You may have lost all shame. But everyone hasn’t. Just remember
that.”
He knew that the Tulsi daughters who lived with their husbands often went back after a
quarrel to Hanuman House, where they complained and got sympathy and, if they didn’t stay too
long, respect. “All right,” he said. “Pack up and go. I suppose they are going to give you some
medal at the monkey house.”
After she left, he stood in the shop doorway, fondling his belly and watching his creditors
coming back from the fields. The only thing that gave him pleasure was the thought of the surprise
these people were going to get in a few days: a flutter of disturbances throughout The Chase for
which he, inactive in his shop, would be responsible.
“Biswas!” Mungroo shouted from the road. “Come out, before I come in.”
The day had arrived. Mungroo was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and slapping at it
with the other.
“Biswas!”
A crowd was beginning to gather. Many held papers.
“Paper,” Mungroo said. “He has sent me a paper. I am going to make him eat this piece of
paper. Biswas!”
Unhurriedly Mr. Biswas lifted the counter-flap, pulled the little door open and passed to the
front of the shop. The law was on his side–he had, indeed, brought it into play–and he felt this gave
him complete protection. He leaned against the doorpost, felt the wall quiver, stifled his fear about
the wall tumbling down, and crossed his legs.
“Biswas! I am going to make you eat this paper.”
Women screamed from the road.
“Touch me,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Paper,” Mungroo said, stepping into the yard.
Touch me and I bring you up.”
Still Mungroo advanced.
“I bring you up and you spend Carnival in jail.”
The effect was startling. Carnival was less than a month away. Mungroo halted. His
followers, seeing themselves leaderless during the two most important days of the stick-fighting
year, at once ran to Mungroo and held him back.
“I call all of all-you as witnesses,” Mr. Biswas said, unaware of the reasons for his
deliverance. “Let him touch me. And all of all-you have to come to court to be my witnesses.” He
believed that by being the first to ask them he had bound them legally. “Can’t ask my wife,” he
went on. “They don’t take wife as witness. But I asking all of all-you here.”
“Paper. The man has sent me a paper,” Mungroo muttered, while he allowed himself, without
loss of prestige, to be pushed slowly back to the road by his followers.
“Well,” Mr. Biswas said. “One man get his paper. He had it coming to him a long time. Let
me tell you, eh. Don’t let Tom, Dick or Harry think he can play with me, you hear. One man get his
paper. A lot more going to get their paper before I finish. And don’t come to talk to me. Go and
talk to Seebaran.”
When he came to the shop, a week later, Moti was businesslike. As soon as he greeted Mr.
Biswas he took out a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, spread it on the counter and began ticking
off names with his fountain pen. “Well, Ratni pay up,” he said. “Dookhni pay. Sohun pay.
Godberdhan pay. Rattan pay.”
“We frighten them, eh? So, no legal proceedings against them, then?”
“Jankie ask for time. Pritam too. But they going to pay, especially as they see the others
paying up.”
“Good, good,” Mr. Biswas said. “I could do with their money right now.”
Moti folded the sheet of paper.
“So?” Mr. Biswas said.
Moti put the paper in his pocket.
Mr. Biswas pretended he hadn’t been waiting for anything. “And Mungroo?”
“I glad you ask about him. As a matter of fact, he giving us a little trouble.” Moti took out a
long envelope from his trouser pocket and handed it to Mr. Biswas. “This is for you.”
It was a communication, on stiff paper, from the Attorney-General.
Mr. Biswas read with disbelief, annoyance and distress.
“Who is this damn Muslim Mahmoud who stamp his dirty name down here? He is a solicitor
and conveyancer too, eh? I thought Seebaran was handling all the work in the Petty Civil.”
“No, no,” Moti said soothingly. “This is Assize Court business.”
“Assize. Assize ! So this is what Seebaran land me up in!”
“Seebaran ain’t land you up in nothing. You land yourself. Read the schedule.”
“O God! Look, look. Mungroo bringing me up for damaging his credit!”
“And he have a good case too. You shouldn’t go around telling people he owe you money.
Over and over I hear Seebaran telling clients, ‘Leave everything to me and keep your mouth shut.
Keep your mouth shut. Keep your mouth shut and leave everything to me.’ Over and over. But
clients don’t listen. I know clients who talk their way straight to the gallows.”
“Seebaran didn’t tell me a damn thing. I ain’t even see the blasted man yet.”
“He want to see you now.”
“Just let me get this straight. Mungroo owe me money. I say so and I damage his credit. So
now he can’t go around taking goods on trust and not paying. So he bring me up. Exactly what the
hell this is? And what about those slips?”
“They wasn’t signed. I did warn you about that, remember. But you didn’t listen. Clients
don’t listen. Is a serious business, man. It got Seebaran worried like anything. I could tell you.”
“Hear you. It got Seebaran worried. What about me?”
“Seebaran don’t think you would have a chance in court. He say it would be better to settle
outside.”
“You mean shell out. All right. Pounds, shillings and pence, dollars and cents. Let me hear
who have to get how much. This is the way Seebaran handling all the work in the Petty Civil, eh?”
“Seebaran only want to help you out, you know. You could take your case to some K c or the
other and pay him a hundred guineas before he ask you to sit down. Nobody stopping you.”
Mr. Biswas listened. He learned with surprise that there had already been friendly discussions
between Mungroo’s lawyer, Mahmoud, and Seebaran; so that the case had been raised and virtually
settled without his knowing anything about it at all. It appeared that Mungroo was willing, for one
hundred dollars, to call off the action. The fees of both lawyers came to a hundred dollars as well,
though Seebaran, appreciating Mr. Biswas’s position, had said he would accept only such money as
he could recover from Mr. Biswas’s creditors.
“Suppose,” Mr. Biswas said, “that all the others decide to behave like Mungroo. Suppose that
every manjack bring me up.”
“Don’t think about it,” Moti said. “You would make yourself sick.”
As soon as he could, Mr. Biswas cycled to Arwacas to ask Shama to come back. He did not
tell her what had happened. And it was not from Mrs. Tulsi or Seth that he borrowed the money, but
from Misir, who, in addition to his journalistic, literary and religious activities, had set up as a
usurer, with a capital of two hundred dollars.
More than half the time that remained to Mr. Biswas in The Chase was spent in paying off
this debt.
In all Mr. Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom
and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines
which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive
lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy,
disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheek bones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he
developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on
an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually
distended; not fat: it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of
Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or
flour.
Though he never ceased to feel that some nobler purpose awaited him, even in this limiting
society, he gave up reading Samuel Smiles. That author depressed him acutely. He turned to
religion and philosophy. He read the Hindus; he read the Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus which Mrs.
Weir had given him; he earned the gratitude and respect of a stall-keeper at Arwacas by buying an
old and stained copy of The Supersensual Life ; and he began to dabble in Christianity, acquiring a
volume, written mostly in capital letters, called Arise and Walk . As a boy he had liked to read
descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries; they made him forget the heat and sudden rain
which was all he knew. But now, though his philosophical books gave him solace, he could never
lose the feeling that they were irrelevant to his situation. The books had to be put down. The shop
awaited; money problems awaited; the road outside was short, and went through flat fields of dull
green to small, hot settlements.
And at least once a week he thought of leaving the shop, leaving Shama, leaving the children,
and taking that road.
Religion was one thing. Painting was the other. He brought out his brushes and covered the
inside of the shop doors and the front of the counter with landscapes. Not of the abandoned field
next to the shop, the intricate bush at the back, the huts and trees across the road, or the low blue
mountains of the Central Range in the distance. He painted cool, ordered forest scenes, with
gracefully curving grass, cultivated trees ringed with friendly serpents, and floors bright with
perfect flowers; not the rotting, mosquito-infested jungle he could find within an hour’s walk. He
attempted a portrait of Shama. He made her sit on a fat sack of flour–the symbolism pleased him:
“Suit your family to a T,” he said–and spent so much time on her clothes and the sack of flour that
before he could begin on her face Shama abandoned him and refused to sit any more.
He read innumerable novels, particularly those in the Reader’s Library; and he even tried to
write, encouraged by the appearance in a Port of Spain magazine of a puzzling story by Misir. (This
was a story of a starving man who was rescued by a benefactor and after some years rose to wealth.
One day, driving along the beach, the man heard someone in the sea shouting for help, and
recognized his former benefactor in difficulties. He instantly dived into the water, struck his head
on a submerged rock and was drowned. The benefactor survived.) But Mr. Biswas could never
devise a story, and he lacked Misir’s tragic vision; whatever his mood and however painful his
subject, he became irreverent and facetious as soon as he began to write, and all he could manage
were distorted and scurrilous descriptions of Moti, Mungroo, Seebaran, Seth and Mrs. Tulsi.
And there were whole weeks when he devoted himself to some absurdity. He grew his nails to
an extreme length and held them up to startle customers. He picked and squeezed at his face until
his cheeks and forehead were inflamed and the rims of his lips were like welts. When his skin
became pitted with little holes, he studied these with interest and found the perfection of their shape
pleasing. And once he dabbed healing ointments of various colours on his face and went and stood
in the shop doorway, greeting people he knew.
He did these things when Shama was away. And more and more frequently she went to
Hanuman House, even when there was no quarrel, and stayed longer.
Three years after Savi was born, Shama gave birth to a son. He was not given the names that
had been written on the endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare . Seth suggested that the
boy should be called Anand, and Mr. Biswas, who had prepared no new names, agreed. Then it was
Anand who travelled with Shama. Savi stayed at Hanuman House. Mrs. Tulsi wanted this; so did
Shama; so did Savi herself. She liked Hanuman House for its activity and its multitude of children;
at The Chase she was restless and badly behaved.
“Ma,” Savi said to Shama one day, “couldn’t you give me to Aunt Chinta and take Vidiadhar
in exchange?”
Vidiadhar was Chinta’s newest baby, born a few months before Anand. And the reason for
Savi’s request was this: by virtue of a tradition whose beginnings no one could trace, Chinta was the
aunt who distributed all the delicacies that were given to the House by visitors.
Shama told the story as a joke, and couldn’t understand it when Mr. Biswas became annoyed.
Once a week he rode his Royal Enfield bicycle to Hanuman House to see Savi. Often he
didn’t have to go inside; Savi was waiting for him in the arcade. At every visit he gave her a silver
six-cents piece and asked anxious questions.
“Who beat you?”
Savi shook her head.
“Who shouted at you?”
“They shout at everybody.”
She didn’t seem to need a protector.
One Saturday he found her wearing heavy boots with long iron bands down the side of her
legs and straps over her knees.
“Who put these on you?”
“Granny.” She was not aggrieved. She was proud of the boots, the iron, the straps. “They are
heavy, heavy.”
“Why did she put them on? To punish you?”
“Only to straighten my legs.”
She had bow-legs. He didn’t believe anything could be done about them and had never tried
to find out.
“They are ugly.” That was all he could say. “They make you look like a cripple.”
She frowned at the word. “Well, I like it.” Then, taking the six cents, “At least, I don’t mind.”
She threw out her hands, then put them on her hips and looked away, just like one of the aunts.
The numbers of the Tulsis swelled continually. Fresh children were born to the resident
daughters. A son-in-law who lived away died, and his brood came to Hanuman House, where they
were distinguished and made glamorous by their mourning clothes of black, white and mauve. This
Christian custom did not please everyone. And almost at once Shama had tales to take back to The
Chase about the low manners and language of the new arrivals. There were even whispers of theft
and obscene practises, and Shama reported the general approval when the widow, anxious to
appease, took to inflicting spectacular punishments on her bereaved children.
All this made Mr. Biswas uneasy, and he was mortified to find that Savi now talked of
nothing but the mourners, their misdeeds and their punishments.
“Sometimes,” Savi said, “their mother simply hands over to Granny.”
“Look, Savi. If Granny or anybody else touches you, you just let me know. Don’t let them
frighten you. I will take you home right away. You just let me know.”
“And Granny tied Vimla to the bed in the Rose Room and blindfolded her and pinched her all
over.”
“God!”
“It serves Vimla right. The language that girl has picked up.”
Mr. Biswas wanted to know whether Savi had been blindfolded and pinched herself; but he
was afraid to ask.
“Oh, I like Granny,” Savi said. “I think she is very funny. And she likes me.”
“Yes?”
“She calls me the little paddler.”
He made no comment.
Another day Savi said, “Granny is making me eat fish. I hate it.”
“Well, you just don’t eat it. Throw it away. Don’t let them feed you any of their bad food.”
“But I can’t refuse. Granny takes out all the bones and feeds me herself.”
When he got back to The Chase he told Shama, “Look, I want you to get your mother to stop
trying to feed my daughter all sort of bad food, you hear.”
She knew about it. “Fish? But the brains good for the brain, you know.”
“It look to me that your family just eat too much damn fish brains, you hear. And I want them
to stop calling the girl the little paddler. I don’t want anybody to give names to my child.”
“And what about the names you give?”
“I just want them to stop it, that is all.”
Never ceasing to believe that their stay at The Chase was only temporary, he had made no
improvements. The kitchen remained askew and rickety; he did not wall off part of the gallery to
make a new room; and he had not thought it worth while to plant trees that would bear flowers or
fruit in two or three years.
It was strange, then, for him to find one day that house and shop bore so many marks of his
habitation. No one might have lived there before him, and it was hard to imagine anyone after him
moving about these rooms and getting to know them as he had done. The hammock rope had worn
polished indentations in the rafters from which it hung. The rope itself had grown darker; where his
hands and Shama’s had held it there were glints like those on the bumps on the lower half of the
mud walls. The thatch was sootier and more bearded; the back rooms smelled of his cigarettes and
his paint; window-sills and the gallery uprights had been made clean by constant leaning. The shop
was gloomier, dingier, smellier, but entirely supportable. The table that had come with the shop had
been so transformed that he felt it had always been his. He had tried to varnish it, but the wood, a
local cedar, was absorbent and never sated, drinking in coat after coat of stain and varnish until, in
exasperation, he painted it one of his forest greens, and had to be dissuaded by Shama from doing a
landscape on it.
And it was strange, too, to find that these disregarded years had been years of acquisition.
They could not move from The Chase on a donkey-cart. They had acquired a kitchen safe of white
wood and netting. This too had been awkward to varnish and had been painted. One leg was shorter
than the others and had to be propped up; now they knew without thinking that they must never lean
on the safe or handle it with violence. They had acquired a hatrack, not because they possessed hats,
but because it was a piece of furniture all but the very poor had. As a result, Mr. Biswas acquired a
hat. And they had acquired, at Shama’s insistence, a dressingtable, the work of a craftsman,
french-polished, with a large, clear mirror. To protect it, they had placed it on lengths of wood in a
dark corner of their bedroom, so that the mirror was almost useless. The first scratches had been
treated as disasters. It had since suffered many more scratches and one major excision, and Shama
polished it less often; but it still looked new and surprisingly rich in that low thatched room. Shama,
never afraid of debt, had wanted a wardrobe as well, but Mr. Biswas said that wardrobes reminded
him of coffins, and their clothes remained in the drawers of the dressingtable, on nails on the wall
and in suitcases under the fourposter.
Though Hanuman House had at first seemed chaotic, it was not long before Mr. Biswas had
seen that in reality it was ordered, with degrees of precedence all the way down, with Chinta below
Padma, Shama below Chinta, Savi below Shama, and himself far below Savi. With no child of his
own, he had wondered how the children survived. Now he saw that in this communal organization
children were regarded as assets, a source of future wealth and influence. His fears that Savi would
be badly treated were absurd, as was his surprise that Mrs. Tulsi should go to such trouble to get
Savi to overcome her dislike of fish.
It was not for this reason alone that his attitude to Hanuman House changed. The House was a
world, more real than The Chase, and less exposed; everything beyond its gates was foreign and
unimportant and could be ignored. He needed such a sanctuary. And in time the House became to
him what Tara’s had been when he was a boy. He could go to Hanuman House whenever he wished
and become lost in the crowd, since he was treated with indifference rather than hostility. And he
went there more often, held his tongue and tried to win favour. It was an effort, and even at times of
great festivity, when everyone worked with energy and joy, enthusiasm reacting upon enthusiasm,
in himself he remained aloof.
Indifference turned to acceptance, and he was pleased and surprised to find that because of his
past behaviour he, like the girl contortionist, now being groomed for marriage, had a certain licence.
On occasion pungent remarks were invited from him, and then almost anything he said raised a
laugh. The gods were away most of the time and he seldom saw them. But he was glad when he did;
for his relationship with them had changed also, and he considered them the only people he could
talk to seriously. Now that he had dropped his Aryan iconoclasm, they discussed religion, and these
discussions in the hall became family entertainments. He invariably lost, since his telling points
could be dismissed as waggishness; which satisfied everybody. His standing rose even higher when
there were guests for important religious ceremonies. It was soon established that Mr. Biswas, like
Hari, was too incompetent, and too intelligent, to be given the menial tasks of the other
brothers-in-law. He was deputed to have disputations with the pundits in the drawingroom.
He took to going to Hanuman House the afternoon before these ceremonies, so that he spent
the night there. And it was then that he was reminded of an old, secret ambition. As a boy he had
envied Ajodha and Pundit Jairam. How often, of an evening, he had seen Jairam bath and put on a
clean dhoti and settle down among the pillows in his verandah with his book and spectacles, while
his wife cooked in the kitchen! He had thought then that to be grown up was to be as contented and
comfortable as Jairam. And when Ajodha sat on a chair and threw his head back, that chair at once
looked more comfortable than any. Despite his hypochondria and fastidiousness Ajodha ate with so
much relish that Mr. Biswas used to feel, even when eating with him, that the food on Ajodha’s
plate had become more delicious. Late in the evenings, before he went to bed, Ajodha let his
slippers fall to the floor, drew up his legs on to the rockingchair and, rocking slowly, sipped a glass
of hot milk, closing his eyes, sighing after every sip; and to Mr. Biswas it had seemed that Ajodha
was relishing the most exquisite luxury. He believed that when he became a man it would be
possible for him to enjoy everything the way Ajodha did, and he promised himself to buy a
rockingchair and to drink a glass of hot milk in the evenings. But on these evenings when Hanuman
House was bright with lights and hummed with happy activity, when he was able to sit among the
cushions on the polished floor of the drawingroom and call for a glass of hot milk, he experienced
no sharp pleasure, and was instead nagged by the uneasiness he had felt when he visited Tara’s and
read That Body of Yours to Ajodha. Then he knew that as soon as he stepped out of the yard he
returned to nonentity, the rumshop on the Main Road and the hut in the back trace. Now it was the
thought of the shop in darkness at The Chase, the shelves of tinned foods that wouldn’t sell, the
display boards that had lost their pleasant smell of new cardboard and printer’s ink and had grown
flyblown and dim, the oily drawer that rocked in its socket and held so little money. And always the
thought, the fear about the future. The future wasn’t the next day or the next week or even the next
year, times within his comprehension and therefore without dread. The future he feared could not be
thought of in terms of time. It was a blankness, a void like those in dreams, into which, past
tomorrow and next week and next year, he was falling.
Once, years before, he was conducting one of Ajodha’s motorbuses that ran its erratic course
to remote and unsuspected villages. It was late afternoon and they were racing back along the
ill-made country road. Their lights were weak and they were racing the sun. The sun fell; and in the
short dusk they passed a lonely hut set in a clearing far back from the road. Smoke came from under
the ragged thatched eaves: the evening meal was being prepared. And, in the gloom, a boy was
leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road. He wore a vest and nothing more.
The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level
sugarcane fields. Mr. Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a
boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a
boy who didn’t know where the road, and that bus, went.
And often, among the pundits and the cushions and the statuary in the drawingroom, eating
the enormous meals the Tulsis provided on these occasions, he was assailed by this sense of utter
desolation. Then, without conviction, he counted his blessings and ordered himself to enjoy the
moment, like the others.
And while he made greater efforts to please at Hanuman House, with Shama, at The Chase, he
became increasingly irritable. After every visit he abused the Tulsis to her, and his invective was
without fantasy or humour.
“Talk about hypocrisy,” Shama said. “Why you don’t tell them so to their face?”
He began to think that she was plotting to get him back to Hanuman House, and he wondered
whether she hadn’t encouraged him to believe that The Chase was temporary. She had never urged
him to make improvements, and was always interested when something was done at Hanuman
House, when the famous clay-brick factory was pulled down or when awnings were put up over the
windows. More and more The Chase was a place where Shama only spent time; she had always
called Hanuman House home. And it was her home, and Savi’s, and Anand’s, as it could never be
his. As he realized every Christmas.
The Tulsis celebrated Christmas in their store and, with equal irreligiosity, in their home. It
was a purely Tulsi festival. All the sons-in-law, and even Seth, were expelled from Hanuman House
and returned to their own families. Even Miss Blackie went to her own people.
For Mr. Biswas Christmas was a day of tedious depression. He went to Pagotes to see his
mother and Tara and Ajodha, none of whom recognized Christmas. His mother cried so much and
with so much feeling he was never sure whether she was glad to see him. Every Christmas she said
the same things. He sounded like his father; if she closed her eyes while he spoke she could imagine
that his father was alive again. She had little to say about herself. She was happy where she was and
did not want to be a burden to any of her sons; her life was over, she had nothing more to do, and
was waiting for death. To feel sympathy for her he had to look, not at her face, but at the thinness of
her hair. It was still black, however: which was a pity, for grey hair would have helped to put him in
a more tender mood. Suddenly she got up and said she was going to make him tea; she was poor,
that was all she could offer. She went out to the gallery and he heard her talking to someone. Her
voice was quite different; it was firm, without a whine, the voice of a woman still energetic and
capable. She brought tea that was lukewarm, with too little tea, too much milk and a taste of
woodsmoke. She told him he needn’t drink it. Dutifully he put his arm around her. The gesture
caused him pain, making him feel his own worthlessness. She didn’t respond, and wept and talked
as before. She said she was going to give him tomatoes and cabbages and lettuces to take home.
When she went out her voice and manner changed again. He gave her a dollar, which he could
scarcely afford. She took it without showing surprise and without a word of thanks. He was always
glad when he could leave the back trace to go to Tara’s.
At last Shama said she could stand The Chase no more. She wanted them to give up the shop
and return to Hanuman House. This re-opened all their old quarrels. Only, now everything Shama
said was true and cutting.
“We are not doing anything here,” she said.
“All right, Mrs. Samuel Smiles. Look, I standing up in this shop, behind this dirty old counter.
Tell me exactly what it have for me to do. You tell me.”
“You know it isn’t that I mean.”
“You want me to make the spinning-jenny and the flying shuttle? Invent the steam-engine?”
And these arguments ended in insults and were followed by days of silence.
They spent their last two years at The Chase in this state of mutual hostility; at peace only in
Hanuman House.
She became pregnant for the third time.
“Another one for the monkey house,” he said, passing his hands over her belly.
“You had nothing to do with it.”
And though he had spoken humorously, this led to another serious quarrel, which went over
the same limited ground until, unable to control his rage, he hit her.
They were both astonished. She was silenced in the middle of a sentence; for some time
afterwards the unfinished sentence remained in his mind, as though it had just been spoken. She was
stronger than he. Her silence and her refusal to retaliate made his humiliation complete. She dressed
Anand and went to Arwacas.
It was the kite-flying season and in the afternoons, when the wind came from the hills to the
north, for miles around multi-coloured kites with long tails plunged and wriggled like tadpoles in
the clear sky above the plain. He had been thinking that in two or three years he and Anand would
fly kites together.
He decided that this time Shama would have to make the first move. So for many months he
didn’t go to Hanuman House, not even to see Savi. When, however, he judged that the baby was
born, he broke his resolution and closed the shop–what was it that made him know, as he put the bar
into place, that he was closing the doors for the last time?–and wheeled out the Royal Enfield from
the bedroom and cycled to Arwacas, a small man made conspicuous by the exaggeratedly upright
way he sat on the low saddle (to tauten his stomach and relieve his indigestion pains), with his
palms pressing hard on the handgrips and the inside of his wrists turned outwards. He cycled slowly
and steadily, his feet flat on the pedals. From time to time he inclined his head, arched his back and
gave a series of small belches. This gave him some relief.
He reached Arwacas when it was dark, suffering an additional anxiety because he rode
without bicycle lights, an offence zealously pursued by idle policemen. There were no street lamps,
only the yellow smoky flames of flambeaux on night stalls and the dim lights of houses coming
through curtained doorways and windows. In the arcade of Hanuman House, grey and substantial in
the dark, there was already the evening assembly of old men, squatting on sacks on the ground and
on tables now empty of Tulsi Store goods, pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of
ganja and burnt sacking. Though it wasn’t cold, many had scarves over their heads and around their
necks; this detail made them look foreign and, to Mr. Biswas, romantic. It was the time of day for
which they lived. They could not speak English and were not interested in the land where they
lived; it was a place where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they expected.
They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused,
afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. And every evening they came to
the arcade of the solid, friendly house, smoked, told stories, and continued to talk of India.
Mr. Biswas went in by the tall side gate. The hall was lit by one oil lamp. Despite the late
hour children were still eating. Some were at the long table, some on benches and chairs about the
hall, two in the hammock, some on the steps, some on the landing, and two on the disused piano.
Two of the lesser Tulsi sisters and Miss Blackie were supervising.
No one seemed surprised to see him. He was grateful for that. He looked for Savi and had
trouble in locating her. She saw him first, smiled, but didn’t leave the table. He went up to her.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was
disappointed or not.
“Missing your six cents, eh?” He studied the food on Savi’s enamel plate: curried beans, fried
tomatoes and a dry pancake. “Where’s your mother?”
“She had another baby. Did you know?”
He noticed the fatherless children. They had given up their offending mourning suits; even so,
their clothes were different. He didn’t know these children very well and they regarded him, a
visiting father, with curiosity.
“Ma said you beat her,” Savi said.
The fatherless children looked at Mr. Biswas with dread and disapproval. They all had large
eyes: another distinguishing feature.
Mr. Biswas laughed. “She was only joking,” he said in English.
“She upstairs, rubbing down Myna,” Savi said, in English as well.
“Myna, eh? Another girl.” He spoke light-heartedly, trying to get the attention of the two
Tulsi sisters. “This family just full of girl children.”
The sisters tittered. He turned to them and smiled.
Shama was not in the Rose Room, but in the wooden bridge between the two houses. A basin
with soapy, baby-smelling water was on the floor and, as Savi had said, Shama was rubbing down
Myna, the way she had rubbed down Savi herself and Anand (asleep on the bed: no more rubbing
for him, for the rest of his life).
Shama saw him, but concentrated on the baby, folding limbs this way and that, saying the
rhyme that was to end in a laugh, a bunching of the limbs over the belly, a clap, and a release of the
limbs.
Mr. Biswas watched.
While she was dressing Myna, Shama said, “Have you eaten?”
He shook his head. They might have parted only the hour before. And not only that. She had
spoken about eating, and there was nothing in her voice to hint at the innumerable quarrels they had
had about food. He had often opened tins of salmon and sardines from the shop after refusing to eat
her food and sometimes throwing it away, food as unimaginative as that he had just seen on Savi’s
plate. It wasn’t that the Tulsis couldn’t cook. They thought appetizing food should be reserved for
religious festivals; at other times it was a carnal indulgence. Mr. Biswas’s digestion had been
repeatedly shocked to move from plain food before a ceremony to excessively rich food on the day
of the ceremony and promptly back to plain food the day after.
Myna fell asleep at Shama’s breast and was laid on the bed next to Anand. A pillow was
placed at her side to keep her from rolling off, and the oil lamp in the bracket on the un-painted wall
was turned down.
When Mr. Biswas and Shama passed through the verandah it was thronged with children
sitting on mats, reading or playing cards or draughts. These games had been recently introduced and
were taken with the utmost seriousness; they were regarded as intellectual disciplines particularly
suitable for children. Savi, too small for books, was playing Go-to-Pack with one of the large-eyed
children. Everyone talked in whispers. Shama walked on tiptoe.
“Mai sick,” she said.
Which accounted for the children’s late dinner and the absence of so many of the sisters.
Shama laid out food for Mr. Biswas in the hall. The food might be bad at Hanuman House,
but there was always some for unexpected visitors. Everything was cold. The pancakes were
sweating, hard on the outside and little better than dough inside. He did not complain.
“You going back tonight?” she asked in English.
He knew then that he hadn’t intended to go back, ever. He said nothing.
“You better sleep here then.”
As long as there was floor space, there was bed space.
Some sisters came into the hall. Packs of cards were brought out; the sisters split into groups
and gravely settled down to play. Chinta played with style. She fussed with her cards, rearranged
them often, stared blankly and disconcertingly at the other players, hummed and never spoke;
before she played a telling card she frowned at it, pulled it up a little, tapped it down and kept on
tapping it; then, suddenly, she threw it on the table with a crack and, still frowning, collected her
trick. She was a magnanimous winner and a bad loser.
Mr. Biswas watched.
Shama made a bed for him in the verandah upstairs, among the children.
He woke to a babel the next morning and when he went down to the hall found the sisters
getting their children ready for school. It was the only time of day when it was reasonably easy to
tell which child belonged to which mother. He was surprised to see Shama filling a satchel with a
slate, a slate pencil, a lead pencil, an eraser, an exercise book with the Union Jack on the cover, and
Nelson’s West Indian Reader , First Stage, by Captain J. O. Cutteridge, Director of Education,
Trinidad and Tobago. Lastly Shama wrapped an orange in tissue paper and put it in the satchel.
“For teacher,” she said to Savi.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know that Savi had begun to go to school.
Shama sat on a bench, held Savi between her legs, combed her hair, plaited it, straightened the
pleats on her navy-blue uniform, and adjusted her Panama hat.
Mother and daughter had been doing this for many weeks. And he had known nothing.
Shama said, “If your shoelaces come loose again today, you think you would be able to tie
them back?” She bent down and undid Savi’s shoelaces. “Let me see you tie them.”
“You know I can’t tie them.”
“Do it quick sharp, or I give you a dose of licks.”
“I can’t tie them.”
“Come,” Mr. Biswas said, shamelessly paternal in the bustling hall. “I will tie them for you.”
“No,” Shama said. “She must learn to tie her laces. Otherwise I will keep her at home and
beat her until she can tie them.”
It was standard talk at Hanuman House. At The Chase Shama had never spoken like that.
As yet no one was paying attention. But when Shama started to hunt for one of the many
hibiscus switches which always lay about the hall, sisters and children became less noisy and
good-humouredly waited to see what would happen. It was not going to be a serious flogging since
ineptitude rather than criminality was being punished; and Shama moved about with a comic
jerkiness, as though she knew she was only an actor in a farce and not, like Sumati at the
house-blessing in The Chase, a figure of high tragedy.
Mr. Biswas, his eyes fixed on Savi, found himself tittering nervously. Still wearing her
Panama hat, Savi squatted on the floor, tangling laces and watching them fall apart, or knotting
them double, tight and high, and having to undo them with her nails and teeth. She, too, was partly
acting for the audience. Her failures were greeted with approving laughter. Even Shama, standing
by with whip in hand, allowed amusement to invade her playacting annoyance.
“All right,” Shama said. “Let me show you for the last time. Watch me. Now try.”
Savi fumbled ineffectually again. This time there was less laughter.
“You just want to shame me,” Shama said. “A big girl like you, five going on six, can’t tie her
own laces. Jai, come here.”
Jai was the son of an unimportant sister. He was pushed to the front by his mother, who was
dandling another baby on her hip.
“Look at Jai,” Shama said. “His mother don’t have to tie his shoelaces. And he is a whole year
younger than you.”
“Fourteen months younger,” Jai’s mother said.
“Well, fourteen months younger,” Shama said, directing her annoyance to Savi. “You want to
defy me?”
Savi was still squatting.
“Hurry up now!” Shama said, so loudly and suddenly that Savi jumped and began playing
stupidly with the laces.
No one laughed.
Stooping, Shama brought the hibiscus switch down on Savi’s bare legs.
Mr. Biswas looked on, a fixed smile on his face. He made phlegmy little noises, urging
Shama to stop.
Savi was crying.
Sushila, the widow, came to the top of the stairs and said authoritatively, “Remember Mai.”
They all remembered. Silence for the sick. The scene was over.
Shama, trying too late to turn comedy into tragedy, developed a sudden temper and stamped
off, almost unnoticed, to the kitchen.
Sumati, the flogger at The Chase, pulled Savi to her long skirt. Savi cried into it and used it to
wipe her nose and dry her eyes. Then Sumati tied Savi’s laces and sent her off to school.
At The Chase Shama had seldom beat Savi, and then it had been only a matter of a few slaps.
But at Hanuman House the sisters still talked with pride of the floggings they had received from
Mrs. Tulsi. Certain memorable floggings were continually recalled, with commonplace detail made
awful and legendary by its association with a stupendous event, like the detail in a murder case.
And there was even some rivalry among the sisters as to who had been flogged worst of all.
Mr. Biswas had breakfast: biscuits from the big black drum, red butter, and tea, lukewarm,
sugary and strong. Shama, though indignant, was dutiful and correct. As she watched him eat, her
indignation became more and more defensive. Finally she was only grave.
“You see Mai yet?”
He understood.
They went to the Rose Room. Sushila admitted them and at once went outside. A shaded oil
lamp burned low. The jalousied window in the thick clay-brick wall was closed, keeping out
daylight; cloth was wedged around the frame, to keep out draughts. There was a smell of ammonia,
bay rum, rum, brandy, disinfectant, and a variety of febrifuges. Below a white canopy with red
appliqu apples Mrs. Tulsi lay, barely recognizable, a bandage around her forehead, her temples
dotted with lumps of soft candle, her nostrils stuffed with some white medicament.
Shama sat on a chair in a shadowed corner, effacing herself.
The marble topped bedside table was a confusion of bottles, jars and glasses. There were little
blue jars of medicated rubs, little white jars of medicated rubs; tall green bottles of bay rum and
short square bottles of eyedrops and nosedrops; a round bottle of rum, a flat bottle of brandy and an
oval royal blue bottle of smelling-salts; a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment and a tiny tin of Tiger Balm; a
mixture with a pink sediment and one with a yellow-brown sediment, like muddy water left to stand
from the previous night.
Mr. Biswas didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Tulsi in Hindi, but the Hindi words came out. “How
are you, Mai? I couldn’t come to see you last night because it was too late and I didn’t want to
disturb you.” He hadn’t intended to give any explanations.
“How are you?” Mrs. Tulsi said nasally, with unexpected tenderness. “I am an old woman and
it doesn’t matter how I am.”
She reached out for the bottle of smelling salts and sniffed at it. The bandage around her
forehead slipped down to her eyes. Adapting her tone of tenderness to one of distress and authority,
she said, “Come and squeeze my head, Shama.”
Shama obeyed with alacrity. She sat on the edge of the bed and undid the bandage, undid Mrs.
Tulsi’s hair, parted it in several places, poured bay rum into her palms and from there into the
partings. She worked the bay rum into Mrs. Tulsi’s scalp and the soaked hair squelched. Mrs. Tulsi
looked comforted. She closed her eyes, screwed the white medicament a little further up her
nostrils, and patted her lips with a thin shawl.
“You have seen your daughter?”
Mr. Biswas laughed.
“Two girls,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Our family is unlucky that way. Think of the worry I had when
your father died. Fourteen daughters to marry. And when you marry your girl children you can’t say
what sort of life you are letting them in for. They have to live with their Fate. Mothers-in-law,
sisters-in-law. Idle husbands. Wife-beaters.”
Mr. Biswas looked at Shama. She was concentrating on Mrs. Tulsi’s head. At every press of
Shama’s long fingers Mrs. Tulsi closed her eyes, interrupted what she was saying and groaned,
“Aah.”
“That is what a mother has to put up with,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I don’t mind. I have lived long
enough to know that you can’t expect anything from anybody. I give you five hundred dollars. Do
you think I want you to bow and scrape and touch my feet whenever you see me? No. I expect you
to spit on me. I expect that. When you want five hundred dollars again you come back to me. Do
you want me to say, ‘The last time I gave you five hundred dollars you spat on me. Therefore I
can’t give you five hundred dollars this time’? Do you want me to say that? No. I expect the people
who spit on me to come to me again. I have a soft heart. And when you have a soft heart, you have
a soft heart. Your father used to say to me, ‘My bride’–that was the way he called me until the day
he died–‘my bride,’ he used to say, ‘you have the softest heart of any person I know. Be careful of
that soft heart. People will take advantage of that soft heart and trample on it.’ And I used to say,
‘When you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart.’ “
She pressed her eyes till tears ran down her cheeks. Her damp grey hair was spread out on the
pillow. Now here was a woman with grey hair, and he felt little tenderness towards her.
Then he noted, what he had missed in the darkness, that Shama’s cheeks were also wet. She
must have been crying silently all along.
“I don’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. She blew her nose and called for bay rum. Shama filled her
palm with bay rum, drenched Mrs. Tulsi’s face and pressed her palm over Mrs. Tulsi’s nose. Mrs.
Tulsi’s face shone; she screwed up her eyes to prevent the bay rum going into them and breathed
loudly through her mouth. Shama removed her hand and Mrs. Tulsi said, “But I don’t know what
Seth will say.”
As at a cue Seth came in. He ignored Mr. Biswas and Shama and asked Mrs. Tulsi how she
was, expressing in those words his concern for Mrs. Tulsi and his impatience with the people who
were disturbing her. He sat on the other side of the bed. The bed creaked; he sighed; he shifted his
feet and his bluchers drummed on the floor in annoyance.
“We’ve been talking,” Mrs. Tulsi said gently.
Shama gave a little sob.
Seth sucked his teeth. He sounded extremely irritable; it was as if he too were unwell, with a
cold or a headache. “Paddling-addling,” he said. His voice was gruff and indistinct.
“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
Seth held his thigh and looked at the floor.
And Mr. Biswas was convinced of what he had already guessed from Mrs. Tulsi’s speech and
Shama’s tears: that the scene had been arranged, that there had been not only discussions, but
decisions. And Shama, who had arranged the scene, was crying to lessen his humiliation, to shift
some of it to herself. Her tears were ritual in another way: they were tears for the hardships that had
come to her with a husband she had been given by Fate.
“So what we going to do about the shop?” Seth asked in English. He was still irritable and his
voice, though businesslike, was weary.
Mr. Biswas couldn’t think. “Is a bad site for a shop,” he said.
“A bad site today could be a good site tomorrow,” Seth said. “Suppose I drop a few cents here
and there and get the Public Works to run the trunk road through there after all? Eh?”
Shama’s sobs mingled with the squelch of bay rum in Mrs. Tulsi’s hair.
“You got any debts?”
“Well, a lot of people owing me but they won’t pay.”
“Not after what happen with Mungroo. I suppose you was the only man in Trinidad who
didn’t know about Seebaran and Mahmoud.”
Shama was crying openly.
Abruptly Seth lost interest in Mr. Biswas. He said, “Tcha!” and looked at his bluchers.
“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I know you haven’t got a soft heart. But you mustn’t
mind.”
Seth sighed. “So what we going to do with the shop?”
Mr. Biswas shrugged.
“Insure-and-burn?” Seth said, making it one word: insuranburn .
Mr. Biswas felt that talk like this belonged to the realms of high finance.
Seth crossed his big arms high over his chest. “Is the only thing for you to do now.”
“Insuranburn,” Mr. Biswas said. “How much I going to make out of that?”
“More than you would make if you don’t insuranburn. The shop is Mai own. The goods is
yours. For the goods you ought to get about seventy-five, a hundred dollars.”
It was a large sum. Mr. Biswas smiled.
But Seth only said, “And after that, what?”
Mr. Biswas tried to look thoughtful.
“You still too proud to get your hands dirty in the fields?” And Seth displayed his own hands.
“Soft heart,” Mrs. Tulsi muttered.
“I want a driver at Green Vale,” Seth said.
Shama gave a loud sob and, suddenly leaving Mrs. Tulsi’s head, rushed to Mr. Biswas and
said, “Take it, man. Take it, I beg you.” She was making it easy for him to accept. “He will take it,”
she cried to Seth. “He will take it.”
Seth looked irritable and turned away.
Mrs. Tulsi groaned.
Shama, still crying, went back to the bed and pressed her fingers into Mrs. Tulsi’s hair.
Mrs. Tulsi said, “Aah.”
“I don’t know anything about estate work,” Mr. Biswas said, trying to salvage some of his
dignity.
“Nobody begging you,” Seth said.
“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “You know what Owad always tells me. He always
blames me for the way I married off my daughters. And I suppose he is right. But then Owad is
going to college, reading and learning all the time. And I am very oldfashioned.” She spoke with
pride in Owad and pride in her oldfashionedness.
Seth stood up. His bluchers scraped on the floor, the bed made noises, and Mrs. Tulsi was
slightly disturbed. But Seth’s irritability had disappeared. He took out the ivory cigarette holder
which had been pushing up through the buttoned flap of the pocket on his khaki shirt, put it in his
mouth and blew whistlingly through it. “Owad. You remember him, Mohun?” He laughed, opening
his mouth on either side of the holder. “The old hen son.”
“What is past is past,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “When people are boys they behave like boys. When
they are men they behave like men.”
Shama squeezed vigorously at Mrs. Tulsi’s head and succeeded in reducing Mrs. Tulsi’s
speech to a series of “Aah. Aah.” She washed bay rum into Mrs. Tulsi’s hair and face and held her
palm over Mrs. Tulsi’s nose and mouth.
“This insuranburning,” Mr. Biswas said, and his tone was light, “who going to see about it?
Me?” He was putting himself back into the role of the licensed buffoon.
Shama was the first to laugh. Seth followed. A croak came from Mrs. Tulsi and Shama took
away her hand from Mrs. Tulsi’s mouth to allow her to laugh.
Mrs. Tulsi began to splutter. “He want,” she said in English, choking with laughter, “to jump–
from–the fryingpan–into–into–”
They all roared.
“–into–the fire!”
The witty mood spread.
“No more paddling,” Seth said.
“We insuranburning right away?” Mr. Biswas asked, pitching his voice high and speaking
quickly.
“You got to get your furniture out first,” Seth said.
“My bureau!” Shama exclaimed, and put her hand to her own mouth, as though astonished
that, when she had left Mr. Biswas, she had forgotten to take that piece of furniture with her.
“You know,” Seth said, “the best thing would be for you to do the insuranburning.”
“No, Uncle,” Shama said. “Don’t start putting ideas in his head.”
“Don’t worry with the child,” Mr. Biswas said. “You just tell me.”
Seth sat on the bed again. “Well, look,” he said, and his voice was amused and avuncular.
“You had this trouble with Mungroo. You go to the police station and lay your life on Mungroo
head.”
“Lay my what on Mungroo head?”
“Tell them about the row. Tell them that Mungroo threatening to kill you. And the moment
anything happen to you, the first person they would pick up would be Mungroo.”
“You mean the first person they would pick up would be me. But let me get this straight.
When I dead, like a cockroach, lying on my back with my four foot throw up straight and stiff and
high in the air, you want me to walk to the police station and say, ‘I did tell all-you so.’ “
Mrs. Tulsi, still chuckling over her own joke, the first she had managed in English, made Mr.
Biswas’s an excuse to burst out laughing again.
“Well, you lay your life on Mungroo head,” Seth said. “You go back to The Chase and stay
quiet. You let one week pass, two weeks, even three. Then you make your little preparations. You
let Shama collect her bureau. On Thursday, half-day, you drop pitch-oil all over the shop–not where
you sleeping–and in the night-time you set a match to it. You give it a little time–not too much–and
then you run outside and start bawling for Mungroo.”
“You mean,” Mr. Biswas said, “that this is why all those motorcars burning up every day in
this place? And all those houses?”
5. Green Vale
Whenever afterwards Mr. Biswas thought of Green Vale he thought of the trees. They were
tall and straight, and so hung with long, drooping leaves that their trunks were hidden and appeared
to be branchless. Half the leaves were dead; the others, at the top, were a dead green. It was as if all
the trees had, at the same moment, been blighted in luxuriance, and death was spreading at the same
pace from all the roots. But death was forever held in check. The tonguelike leaves of dead green
turned slowly to the brightest yellow, became brown and thin as if scorched, curled downwards
over the other dead leaves and did not fall. And new leaves came, as sharp as daggers; but there was
no freshness to them; they came into the world old, without a shine, and only grew longer before
they too died.
It was hard to imagine that beyond the trees on every side lay the clear plain. Green Vale was
damp and shadowed and close. The trees darkened the road and their rotting leaves choked the grass
gutters. The trees surrounded the barracks.
As soon as he saw the barracks Mr. Biswas decided that the time had come for him to build
his own house, by whatever means. The barracks gave one room to one family, and sheltered twelve
families in one long room divided into twelve. This long room was built of wood and stood on low
concrete pillars. The whitewash on the walls had turned to dust, leaving stains like those left on
stones by bleaching clothes; and these stains were mildewed and sweated and freckled with grey
and green and black. The corrugated iron roof projected on one side to make a long gallery, divided
by rough partitions into twelve kitchen spaces, so open that when it rained hard twelve cooks had to
take twelve coal-pots to twelve rooms. The ten middle rooms each had a front door and a back
window. The rooms at the end had a front door, a back window, and a side window. Mr. Biswas, as
a driver, was given an end room. The back window had been nailed shut by the previous tenant and
plastered over with newspaper. Its position could only be guessed at, since newspaper covered the
walls from top to bottom. This had obviously been the work of a literate. No sheet was placed
upside down, and Mr. Biswas found himself continuously exposed to the journalism of his time, its
bounce and excitement bottled and made quaint in these old newspapers.
Into this room they moved all their furniture: the kitchen safe, the green kitchen table, the
hatrack, the iron fourposter, a rockingchair Mr. Biswas had bought in the last days at The Chase,
and the dressingtable which, during Shama’s long absences at Hanuman House, had come to stand
for Shama.
Only one small drawer of the dressingtable was Mr. Biswas’s. The others were alien and if by
some chance he opened one he felt he was intruding. It was during the move to Green Vale that he
discovered that, in addition to the finer clothes of Shama and the children, those drawers contained
Shama’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her children; a Bible and Bible pictures she
had got from her mission school and kept, not for their religious content, but as reminders of past
excellence; and a packet of letters from a pen-pal in Northumberland, the result of one of the
headmaster’s schemes. Mr. Biswas yearned after the outside world; he read novels that took him
there; he never suspected that Shama, of all persons, had been in contact with this world.
“You didn’t by any chance keep the letters you did write back?”
“Headteacher used to read them and post them.”
“I woulda like to read your letters.”
So Mr. Biswas became a driver, or sub-overseer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month,
which was twice as much as the labourers got. As he had told Seth, he knew nothing about estate
work. He had been surrounded by sugarcane all his life; he knew that the tall fields shot up
grey-blue, arrow-like flowers just when shop signs were bursting into green and red gaiety, with
holly and berries and Santa Claus and snow-capped letters; he knew the “crop-over” harvest
festival; but he didn’t know about burning or weeding or hoeing or trenching; he didn’t know when
new cuttings had to be put in or mounds of trash built around new plants. He got instructions from
Seth, who came to Green Vale every Saturday to inspect, and pay the labourers, which he did from
the kitchen space outside Mr. Biswas’s room, using the green kitchen table, and having Mr. Biswas
sit beside him to read out the number of tasks each labourer had worked.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know the admiration and respect his father Raghu had had for drivers. But
he could feel the awe the labourers had for the blue and green moneybags with serrated edges and
small circular holes for the money to breathe, and he took some pleasure in handling these bags
casually, as though they were a bother. It sometimes occurred to him that, perhaps at that very
moment, his brothers were standing in similar slow submissive queues on other estates.
On Saturdays, then, he enjoyed power. But on the other days it was different. True, he went
out early every morning with his long bamboo rod and measured out the labourers’ tasks. But the
labourers knew he was unused to the job and was there simply as a watchman and Seth’s
representative. They could fool him and they did, fearing more a single rebuke of Seth’s on
Saturday than a week of shy remonstrance from Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas was ashamed to complain
to Seth. He bought a topee; it was too big for his head, which was rather small, and he adjusted the
topee so badly that it fell down to his ears. For some time after that, whenever the labourers saw Mr.
Biswas they pulled their hats over their eyes, tilted their heads backwards and looked in his
direction. Two or three of the young and impudent even talked to him in this way. He thought he
ought to ride a horse, as Seth did; and he was beginning to feel sympathy for those overseers of
legend who rode on horseback and lashed labourers on either side. Then, being the buffoon with
Seth one Saturday, he mounted Seth’s horse, was thrown after a few yards, and said, “I didn’t want
to go where he was going.”
“Gee up!” one labourer shouted to another on Monday.
“Oops!” the second labourer replied.
Mr. Biswas told Seth, “I got to stop living next door to these people.”
Seth said, “We are going to build a house for you.”
But Seth was only talking. He never mentioned the house again, and Mr. Biswas remained in
the barracks. He began to speak about the brutishness of labourers; and instead of wondering, as he
had done at the beginning, how they lived on three dollars a week, he wondered why they got so
much. He took it out on Shama.
“Is you who get me in this. You and your family. Look at me. I look like Seth? You could
look at me and say that this is my sort of work?”
He came back from the fields sweated, itching and dusty, bitten by flies and other insects, his
skin torn and tender. He welcomed the sweating and the fatigue and the sensation of burning on his
face. But he hated the itching, and dried dirt on his fingernails tortured him as acutely as the sound
of slate pencils on slates or shovels on concrete.
The barrackyard, with its mud, animal droppings and the quick slime on stale puddles, gave
him nausea, especially when he was eating fish or Shama’s pancakes. He took to eating at the green
table in the room, hidden from the front door, his back to the side window, and determined not to
look up at the black, furry underside of the galvanized iron roof. As he ate he read the newspapers
on the wall. The smell of damp and soot, old paper and stale tobacco reminded him of the smell of
his father’s box, under the bed which rested on tree-branches buried in the earth floor.
He bathed incessantly. The barracks had no bathroom but at the back there were waterbarrels
under the spouts which drained off the water from the roof. However quickly the water was used,
there were always larvae of some sort on its surface, jumpy jellylike whiskery things, perfection in
their way. Mr. Biswas stood in pants and sabots on a length of board next to a barrel and threw
water over himself with a calabash dipper. He sang Hindi songs and In the snowy and the blowy
while he did so. Afterwards he wrapped a towel around his waist, took off his pants and then, in
towel and sabots, made a dash for his room. Since there was no side door to his room, he had to run
around to the front, come into full view of all twelve kitchens and all twelve rooms, then bound into
his own.
One day the towel dropped off.
“Is you,” he told Shama, after a terrible day in the fields. “Is you and your family who get me
in this.”
Shama, who had herself spent a day of humiliation at the barracks, cooked one of her
especially bad meals, dressed Anand, a boy now big enough to talk, and took him to Hanuman
House.
On Saturday, after he had paid the labourers, Seth smiled and said, “Your wife say to look in
the top righthand drawer of her bureau and get her pink bodice, and look in the bottom of the
lefthand corner of the middle drawer for the pantaloons for the boy.”
“Ask my wife, which boy?”
But Mr. Biswas explored the alien drawers.
“I nearly forget,” Seth said, just before he left. “That shop at The Chase. Well, it insuranburn
now.”
Seth took out a roll of dollar notes from his trouser pocket and displayed it like a magician.
Note by note, he counted the roll into Mr. Biswas’s hand. It came to seventy-five dollars, the sum
he had mentioned in the Rose Room at Hanuman House.
Mr. Biswas was impressed and grateful. He determined to put his money aside, and add to it,
until he had enough to build his house.
He had thought deeply about this house, and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, in the
first place, a real house, made with real materials. He didn’t want mud for walls, earth for floor, tree
branches for rafters and grass for roof. He wanted wooden walls, all tongue-and-groove. He wanted
a galvanized iron roof and a wooden ceiling. He would walk up concrete steps into a small
verandah; through doors with coloured panes into a small drawingroom; from there into a small
bedroom, then another small bedroom, then back into the small verandah. The house would stand
on tall concrete pillars so that he would get two floors instead of one, and the way would be left
open for future development. The kitchen would be a shed in the yard; a neat shed, connected to the
house by a covered way. And his house would be painted. The roof would be red, the outside walls
ochre with chocolate facings, and the windows white.
His talk about houses made Shama fearful and impatient and had even caused quarrels. So he
did not tell her of this picture or of his plan, and she continued to live for long periods at Hanuman
House. She needed to give no explanations to her sisters now. Green Vale, part of the Tulsi lands
and just outside Arwacas, was considered almost an extension of Hanuman House.
Rejecting the stone-cold food Shama occasionally sent from Hanuman House, and tired of
tins, Mr. Biswas learned to cook for himself; and he bought a primus, since he couldn’t manage the
coal-pot. Sometimes he went for a walk in the early evening; sometimes he stayed in his room and
read. But there were times when, without being fatigued, he could do nothing, when neither food
nor tobacco tasted, and he could only lie on the fourposter and read the newspapers on the wall. He
soon had many of the stories by heart. And the first line of one story, in breathless capitals, came to
possess his mind: AMAZING SCENES WERE WITNESSED YESTERDAY WHEN. Absently he
spoke the words aloud, by himself, with the labourers, with Seth. On some evenings, in his room,
the words came into his head and repeated themselves until they were meaningless and irritating
and he longed to drive them away. He wrote the words on packets of Anchor cigarettes and boxes
of Comet matches. And, to fight this exhausting vacancy that left him with the feeling that he had
drunk gallons of stale, lukewarm water, he took to lettering religious tags on strips of cardboard,
which he hung on the walls against the newspapers. From a Hindi magazine he copied a sentence
which, on cardboard, stretched right across one wall, above the papered window: HE WHO
BELIEVETH IN ME OF HIM I WILL NEVER LOSE HOLD AND HE SHALL NEVER LOSE
HOLD OF ME.
The sugarcane was in arrow. The lanes and roads between the fields were clean green
canyons. And at Arwacas the shop-signs celebrated snow and Santa Claus. The Tulsi Store was
hung with paper holly and berries, but carried no Christmas signs. Mr. Biswas’s old signs still
served. They had faded; the distemper on the wall and columns had flaked off in places and Punch
had lost a piece of his nose; near the ceiling the letters were dim with dust and soot. Savi knew, and
was proud, that the signs had been done by her father. But their gaiety puzzled her; she couldn’t
associate them with the morose man she went to see in the dingy barrackroom and who sometimes
came to see her. She felt, with a sense of loss that became sharper as Christmas drew nearer, that the
signs had been done at some time beyond her memory when her father lived happily at Hanuman
House with her mother and everyone else.
Christmas was the only time of the year when the gaiety of the signs had some meaning. Then
the Tulsi Store became a place of deep romance and endless delights, transformed from the austere
emporium it was on other days, dark and silent, its shelves crammed with bolts of cloth that gave
off acrid and sometimes unpleasant smells, its tables jumbled with cheap scissors and knives and
spoons, towers of dusty blue-rimmed enamel plates interleaved with ragged grey paper, and boxes
of hairpins, needles, pins and thread. Now all day there was noise and bustle. Gramophones played
in the Tulsi Store and all the other stores and even from the stalls in the market. Mechanical birds
whistled; dolls squeaked; toy trumpets were tried out; tops hummed; cars shot across counters, were
seized by hands, and held whining in mid-air. The enamel plates and the hairpins were pushed to
the back, and their place was taken by black grapes in white boxes filled with aromatic sawdust; red
Canadian apples whose scent overrode every other; by a multitude of toys and dolls and games in
boxes, new and sparkling glassware, new china, all smelling of their newness; by Japanese
lacquered trays, stacked one on top the other like a pack of cards, so elegant as they stood that it
was sad to think of them being sold one by one, leaving the store in brown paper and string, and
ending drab, broken and disregarded in ugly kitchens and tumbledown houses. There were stacks,
too, of the Bookers Drug Stores Almanac, with art paper tickling smooth to the touch and a smell of
corresponding richness, with jokes, stories, photographs, quizzes, puzzles, and prizes for
competitions which the Tulsi children were all going to enter but never would, though they had
already inked in their names and addresses on dotted lines. And the decorations: the paper holly and
berries, the spiralling streamers of crepe paper, the cotton wool and the Jack Frost that stuck to
fingers and clothes, the balloons, the lanterns.
The sisters masked their excitement by frowns and complaints of fatigue that fooled no one.
Mrs. Tulsi herself came to the store from time to time, spoke to people she knew, and on occasion
even sold something. The two gods strode sternly about, superintending, signing bills, checking
money. The elder god was especially stern this Christmas and the children were afraid of him. His
behaviour had grown a little strange. He had not yet left the Roman Catholic college, but efforts
were being made to find him a wife from among the handful of eligible families. He expressed his
disapproval by random angry outbursts, tears and threats of suicide. This was construed as a
conventional shyness and, as such, was a source of amusement to sisters and brothers-in-law. But
the children were frightened when he talked of leaving the house and buying rope and soft candle;
they were not sure what he wanted the soft candle for; and they stayed out of his way.
On the morning of Christmas Eve excitement was at its height, but before the afternoon was
out had subsided so far that the displays had ceased to be magical, their gaiety became disorder, and
the disorder could be seen to be superficial. So that before Christmas came, in the shop it was felt to
be over. And throughout the afternoon attention turned more and more to the hall and kitchen where
Sumati, the flogger, was in charge of the baking, and Shama, who had no recognized talents, was
one of her many helpers. The smells from the kitchen had an added savour because, as always at
Hanuman House, the food continued to be ordinary and bad up to the very day of a festival.
The Tulsi Store was closed, the toys left in darkness which would transform them into stock
and the brothers-in-law prepared to leave Hanuman House for their families. As Mr. Biswas cycled
through the night to Green Vale, he remembered he had not got presents for Savi and Anand. But
they expected none from him; they knew they would find their presents in their stockings on
Christmas morning.
Because the sisters were busy the children were given a skimpier dinner than usual. Then
hunts were started for stockings. There were none to be had. The providential, mostly the girls, had
acquired theirs days before, and the boys had to be content with pillowcases. There was talk of
staying awake, but one by one the children dropped out of card games and fell asleep to the songs
that came from their mothers in the kitchen.
Anand had a moment of alarm when he got up. His pillowcase, lying at the foot of his
bedding on the floor, looked empty. But when he shook the pillowcase out he found he had got
what the other boys had: a balloon, one of those he had seen for weeks past in the store, a red apple
in a dark blue wrapper, one of those he had seen in the boxes in the store, and a tin whistle. In her
stocking Savi found a balloon, an apple and a tiny rubber doll. Presents were compared, and when it
was established that there was no cause for jealousy, the children ate their apples, blew up balloons,
and raised a feeble chirruping with tin whistles. Many whistles were soon silenced by spittle or
some fundamental mechanical defect, and most of the boys burst their balloons before going
downstairs to kiss Mrs. Tulsi. Those boys who were to grow up into detestable men gave a single
toot on their whistles, nibbled at their apples and blew up their balloons hardly at all, in this
resembling the girls, who already showed their pleasure in possession and anticipation rather than
fulfilment. Then the children, in varying degrees of contentment, went downstairs and found Mrs.
Tulsi waiting at the long pitchpine table. Their mothers were waiting as well, happy Santa Clauses.
When a discontented child forgot to kiss Mrs. Tulsi and impatiently hurried off to see about food,
his mother called him back.
After breakfast–tea and biscuits from the drum–the children waited for lunch. More whistles
were silenced; more balloons burst. The girls seized the scraps of the boys’ burst balloons and blew
them up into many-coloured bunches of grapes which they rubbed against their cheeks to make a
noise like heavy furniture dragging on an unpolished floor. Lunch was good. And after lunch they
waited for tea: Sumati’s cakes, a local and fraudulent cherry brandy doled out by Chinta, and
icecream, made by Chinta again, who, against annual evidence, was supposed to have an especial
gift for making icecream. And that was that. Dinner was as bad as usual. Christmas was over. And,
like all other Christmases at Hanuman House, it had turned out to be only a series of anticipations.
At the barracks there were no apples, no stockings, no baking of cakes, no churning of
icecream, no refinements to be waited for. It was from the start a day of abandoned eating and
drinking and was to end, not with the beating of children, but with the beating of wives. Mr. Biswas
went to see his mother and had dinner at Tara’s. On Boxing-day he visited his brothers; they had
married nondescript women from nondescript families and spent Christmas with their wives.
The following day Mr. Biswas cycled from Green Vale to Arwacas. When he turned into the
High Street the sight of the stores, open again and carelessly displaying Christmas goods at bargain
prices, reminded him of the presents he had forgotten. He got off his bicycle and leaned it against
the kerb. Before he had taken off his bicycle clips he was accosted by a heavy-lidded shopman who
repeatedly sucked his teeth. The shopman offered Mr. Biswas a cigarette and lit it for him. Words
were exchanged. Then, with the shopman’s arm around his shoulders, Mr. Biswas disappeared into
the shop. Not many minutes later Mr. Biswas and the shopman reappeared. They were both
smoking and excited. A boy came out of the shop partly hidden by the large doll’s house he was
carrying. The doll’s house was placed on the handlebar of Mr. Biswas’s cycle and, with Mr. Biswas
on one side and the boy on the other, wheeled down the High Street.
Every room of the doll’s house was daintily furnished. The kitchen had a stove such as Mr.
Biswas had never seen in real life, a safe and a sink. As they progressed towards Hanuman House
Mr. Biswas’s excitement cooled; his extravagance astonished, then frightened him. He had spent
more than a month’s wages. He couldn’t take back the doll’s house now; he was attracting
continuous attention. And he had bought nothing for Anand. It was always like this. When he
thought of his children he thought mainly of Savi. She was part of those early months at The Chase
and he knew her. Anand belonged completely to the Tulsis.
At Hanuman House they knew about the doll’s house before it arrived. The hall was packed
with sisters and their children. Mrs. Tulsi sat at the pitchpine table patting her lips with her veil.
The children exclaimed when the doll’s house was set down, and in the hush that followed
Savi came forward and stood near it proprietorially.
“Well, what you think?” Mr. Biswas asked the hall, using his quick, high-pitched voice.
The sisters were silent.
Then Padma, Seth’s wife, usually taciturn and oppressed and unwell, began on a long and
involved story, which Mr. Biswas refused to believe, about an incredible doll’s house one of Seth’s
brothers had made for somebody’s daughter, a girl of exceptional beauty who had died shortly
afterwards.
As Padma spoke, the children, boys and girls, gathered round the house. Mr. Biswas was not
altogether happy about this, but was pleased when the children acknowledged Savi’s ownership by
asking her permission to open doors and touch beds. Even as she explored, Savi tried to give the
impression that she was familiar with everything.
“What have you brought for the others?”
It was Mrs. Tulsi.
“Didn’t have room,” Mr. Biswas said gaily.
“When I give, I give to all,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I am poor, but I give to all. It is clear, however,
that I cannot compete with Santa Claus.”
Her voice was even and he would have smiled, as at a witticism, but when he looked at her he
saw that her face was tight with anger.
“Vidiadhar and Shivadhar!” Chinta shouted. “Come here at once. Stop interfering with what
doesn’t belong to you.”
As at a signal the sisters pounced on their children, threatening horrible punishments on those
who interfered with what didn’t belong to them.
“I will peel your backside.”
“I will break every bone in your body.”
And Sumati the flogger said, “I will make you heavy with welts.”
“Savi, go and put it away,” Shama whispered. “Take it upstairs.”
Mrs. Tulsi, rising, patting her lips, said, “Shama, I hope you will have the grace to give me
notice before you move to your mansion.” She laboured up the stairs, and Sushila, the widow who
ruled the sickroom, followed solicitously.
The affronted sisters drew closer together, and Shama stood alone. Her eyes were wide with
dread. She stared accusingly at Mr. Biswas.
“Well,” he said briskly. “I better go back home–to the barracks.”
He urged Savi and Anand to come with him out to the arcade. Savi came willingly. Anand
was, as usual, embarrassed. Mr. Biswas couldn’t help feeling that, compared with Savi, the boy was
a disappointment. He was small for his age, thin and sickly, with a big head; he looked as though he
needed protection, but was shy and tongue-tied with Mr. Biswas and always seemed anxious to be
free of him. Now, when Mr. Biswas put his arms around him, Anand sniffed, rubbed a dirty face
against Mr. Biswas’s trousers, and tried to pull away.
“You must let Anand play with it,” Mr. Biswas said to Savi.
“He is a boy.”
“Don’t worry.” Mr. Biswas rubbed Anand’s bony back. “You are going to get something next
time.”
“I want a car,” Anand said to Mr. Biswas’s trousers. “A big one.”
Mr. Biswas knew the sort he meant. “All right,” he said. “Going to get you a car.”
Immediately Anand broke away and ran back through the gate to the yard, riding an
imaginary horse, wielding an imaginary whip and shouting, “And I going to get a car! I going to get
a car!”
He bought the car; not, despite his promise, the big one Anand wanted, but a clockwork
miniature; and on Saturday, after the labourers had been paid, he took it to Arwacas. His arrival was
noted from the arcade and, as he pushed the side gate open, he heard the message being relayed by
the children in awed and expectant tones: “Savi, your pappa come to see you.”
She came crying to the doorway of the hall. When he embraced her she burst into loud sobs.
The children were silent. He heard the stairs creaking continually, and he became aware of a
thick shuffling and whispering in the black kitchen at the far end.
“Tell me,” he said.
She stifled her sobs. “They break it up.”
“Show me!” he cried. “Show me!”
His rage shocked her out of her tears. She came down the steps and he followed her through
the gallery at the end of the hall into the yard, past a half-full copper reflecting a deep blue sky, and
a black riveted tank where fish, bought alive from the market, swam until the time came for them to
be eaten.
And there, below the almost bare branches of the almond tree that grew in the next yard, he
saw it, thrown against a dusty leaning fence made of wood and tin and corrugated iron. A broken
door, a ruined window, a staved-in wall or even roof–he had expected that. But not this. The doll’s
house did not exist. He saw only a bundle of firewood. None of its parts was whole. Its delicate
joints were exposed and useless. Below the torn skin of paint, still bright and still in parts imitating
brickwork, the hacked and splintered wood was white and raw.
“O God!”
The sight of the wrecked house and the silence of her father made Savi cry afresh.
“Ma mash it up.”
He ran back to the house. The edge of a wall scraped against his shoulder, tearing his shirt and
tearing the skin below.
Sisters had now left the stairs and kitchen and were sitting about the hall.
“Shama!” he bawled. “Shama!”
Savi came slowly up the steps from the courtyard. Sisters shifted their gaze from Mr. Biswas
to her and she remained in the doorway, looking down at her feet.
“Shama!”
He heard a sister whisper, “Go and call your aunt Shama. Quick.”
He noticed Anand among the children and sisters.
“Come here, boy!”
Anand looked at the sisters. They gave him no help. He didn’t move.
“Anand, I call you! Come here quick sharp.”
“Go, boy,” Sumati said. “Before you get blows.”
While Anand hesitated, Shama came. She came through the kitchen doorway. Her veil was
pulled over her forehead. This unusual touch of dutifulness he noted. She looked frightened yet
determined.
“You bitch!”
The silence was absolute.
Sisters shooed away their children up the stairs and into the kitchen.
Savi remained in the doorway behind Mr. Biswas.
“I don’t mind what you call me,” Shama said.
“You break up the dolly house?”
Her eyes widened with fear and guilt and shame. “Yes,” she said, exaggeratedly calm. Then
casually, “I break it up.”
“To please who?” He was losing control of his voice.
She didn’t answer.
He noticed that she looked lonely. “Tell me,” he screamed. “To please these people?”
Chinta got up, straightened out her long skirt and started to walk up the stairs. “Let me go
away, eh, before I hear something I don’t like and have to answer back.”
“I wasn’t pleasing anybody but myself Shama was speaking more surely now and he could
see that she was gaining strength from the approval of her sisters.
“You know what I think of you and your family?”
Two more sisters went up the stairs.
“I don’t care what you think.”
And suddenly his rage had gone. His shouts rang in his head, leaving him startled, ashamed
and tired. He could think of nothing to say.
She recognized the change in his mood and waited, at ease now.
“Go and dress Savi.” He spoke quietly.
She made no move.
“Go and dress Savi !”
His shout frightened Savi and she began to scream. She was trembling and when he touched
her she felt brittle.
Shama at last moved to obey.
Savi pulled away. “I don’t want anybody to dress me.”
“Go and pack her clothes.”
“You are taking her with you?”
It was his turn to be silent.
The children who had been shooed away into the kitchen pushed their faces out of the
doorway.
Shama walked the length of the hall to the stairs, where sisters, sitting on the lower steps,
pulled their knees in to let her pass.
At once everybody relaxed.
Sumati said in an amused voice, “Anand, are you going with your father too?”
Anand pulled his head back into the kitchen.
The hall became active again. Children drifted back, and sisters hurried between kitchen and
hall, laying out the evening meal. Chinta returned arid started on a light-hearted song, which was
taken up by other sisters.
The drama was over, and Shama’s re-entry, with ribbons, comb and a small cardboard
suitcase, did not have the same attention as her exit.
Offering the suitcase with outstretched hand, Shama said, “She is your daughter. You know
what is good for her. You have been feeding her. You know–”
He set his mouth, pulling his upper teeth behind his lower.
Chinta broke off her singing to say to Savi, “Going home, girl?”
“Put some shoes on her feet,” Shama said.
But that meant washing Savi’s feet, and that meant delay; and, pushing away Shama when she
tried to comb Savi’s hair, he led Savi outside. It was only when they were in the High Street that he
remembered Anand.
Market day was over and the street was littered with broken boxes, torn paper, straw, rotting
vegetables, animal droppings and, though it hadn’t rained, a number of puddles. By the light of
flambeaux stalls were being stripped and carts loaded by vendors, their wives and tired children.
Mr. Biswas tied the suitcase to the carrier of his bicycle, and he and Savi walked in silence to
the end of the High Street.
When the red and ochre police station was out of sight, he put Savi on the crossbar of the
cycle, took a short run and, with difficulty and some nervousness, hopped on to the saddle. The
cycle wobbled; Savi held on to his left arm and made balance more uncertain. Presently, however,
they had left Arwacas and there was nothing but silent sugarcane on either side of the road. It was
pitch black. The bicycle had no lights and they couldn’t see for more than a few yards ahead. Savi
was trembling.
“Don’t frighten.”
A light flashed in front of them. A gritty male voice said harshly, “Where you think you
going?”
It was a Negro policeman. Mr. Biswas pulled at his handbrakes. The bicycle leaned to the left
and Savi slipped to the ground.
The policeman examined the bicycle. “No licence, eh? No licence. No lights. And you was
towing. You have a nice little case coming up.” He paused, waiting to be bribed. “All right, then.
Name and address.” He wrote in his book. “Good. You go be getting a summons.”
So they walked the rest of the way to Green Vale, through the darkness, and then below the
dead trees to the barracks.
They spent a miserable week. Mr. Biswas left the barracks early in the morning and returned
in the middle of the afternoon. All that time Savi was alone. An old woman, who was spending time
with her son, his wife and five children in a barrackroom, took pity on Savi and gave her food at
midday. This food Savi never ate; hunger could not overcome her distrust of food cooked by
strangers. She took the plate to the room, emptied it on to a sheet of newspaper, washed the plate,
took it back to the old woman, thanked her, and waited for Mr. Biswas. When he came she waited
for the night; when the night came she waited for the morning.
To amuse her, he read from his novels, expounded Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, made her
learn the quotations hanging on the walls, and made her sit still while he unsuccessfully tried to
sketch her. She was dispirited and submissive. She was also afraid. Sometimes, especially during
walks under the trees, he suddenly seemed to forget her, and she heard him muttering to himself,
holding bitter, repetitive arguments with unseen persons. He was “trapped” in a “hole”. “Trap,” she
heard him say over and over. “That’s what you and your family do to me. Trap me in this hole.”
She saw his mouth twist with anger; she heard him curse and threaten. When they got back to the
barracks he asked her to mix him doses of Macleans’ Brand Stomach Powder.
They were both looking forward to Saturday afternoon, when Seth would come and take her
back to Hanuman House. There was a good reason why she couldn’t stay any longer: her school
was opening on Monday.
On Saturday Seth came. He was not alone. Shama, Anand and Myna came with him. Savi ran
to the road to meet them. Mr. Biswas pretended he didn’t see, and Seth smiled, as at the antics of
children. Quarrels between Seth and his wife were unknown, and it was his policy never to interfere
in quarrels between sisters and their husbands. But Mr. Biswas knew that despite the smile Seth had
come as Shama’s protector.
He immediately took out the green table to the yard, setting it some distance away from the
room, and the labourers queued up, screening him from Shama. While he sat beside Seth, calling
out tasks and wages and making entries in the ledger, he listened to Savi talking excitedly to Shama
and Anand. He heard Shama’s cooing replies. Soon she was so sure of the children’s affection that
she was even scolding them. What a difference there was, though, in the voice she used now and the
voice she used at Hanuman House!
And even while he noted Shama’s duplicity, he felt that Savi had betrayed him.
The labourers were paid. Seth said he wanted to have a look at the fields; it was not necessary
for Mr. Biswas to come with him.
Shama was sitting in the kitchen area. She held Myna in her arms and was playing with her,
talking baby-talk. Savi and Anand looked on. When Mr. Biswas passed, Shama glanced at him but
did not stop talking to Myna.
Savi and Anand looked up apprehensively.
Mr. Biswas went into the room and sat in the rocking-chair.
Shama said loudly, “Anand, go and ask your father if he would like a cup of tea.”
Anand came, shy and worried, and mumbled the message.
Mr. Biswas did not reply. He studied Anand’s big head and thin arms. The skin at the elbow
was baggy, and scarred purple with eczema. Had he too been fed on sulphur and condensed milk?
Anand waited, then went outside.
Mr. Biswas rocked. The floor-planks were wide and rough. One had cambered and cracked;
whenever the rockers came down on it, it squeaked and snapped.
Savi, not looking at Mr. Biswas, brought Myna into the room and laid her carefully on the
bed.
Shama was fanning the coal-pot.
Savi, her pyromaniacal instincts aroused, hurried out of the room, saying, “Ma, you getting
coal all over your clothes. Let me.”
So. They had all forgotten the doll’s house. He drew up his feet on to the chair, leaned his
head back, closed his eyes and rocked. The board replied.
“Anand, take this to your father.”
He heard Anand approaching but didn’t open his eyes. He wondered whether he shouldn’t
take the tea and fling it over Shama’s fussy embroidered dress and smiling, uncertain face.
He opened his eyes, took the cup from Anand, and sipped.
When Seth came back he smiled at everyone benevolently and sat down on the steps. Shama
gave him a large cup of tea and he drank it in three gurgling draughts, snorting and sighing in
between. He took off his hat and smoothed his damp hair. Suddenly he began to laugh. “Mohun, I
hear you have a case.”
“Case? Oh, case ! Small one. Tiny tiny. Baby case, really.”
“You are a funny sort of paddler. Get your summons yet?”
“Waiting for it.”
“And Savi. You get your summons yet?”
Savi smiled, as though there had been no terror in the dark road and the flash of the
policeman’s torch.
“Well, don’t worry.” Seth got up. “These people just want to see whether your dollar-notes
look any different from theirs. I settle it up. Wouldn’t do anybody any good for your case to come
up.”
And he was gone.
Mr. Biswas closed his eyes, rocked on the noisy board, and the children became anxious
again.
He remained in the chair until it was dark and time to eat. Oil lamps were lighted in many
barrackrooms. Far down a drunk man was swearing.
Savi and Anand ate sitting on the steps. As he ate at the green table Mr. Biswas became less
torpid, and Shama correspondingly gloomier. Towards the end of the meal he even began to clown.
He squatted on the chair, with his left hand squashed between calf and thigh, and asked banteringly,
“Why you didn’t stay at the monkey house, eh?”
She didn’t reply.
After he had washed his hands and gargled out of the side window, Shama sat down on the
steps to eat. He watched her.
“Crying, eh?”
Slowly the tears flowed out of her wide eyes.
“So you vex up then?”
One tear raced down her cheek and hung trembling over her top lip.
“It tickling?”
Her mouth was half full but she stopped chewing.
“Don’t tell me the food so bad.”
She said, as though to herself, “If it wasn’t for the children–”
“If it wasn’t for the children, what?”
She continued to chew with a loud and morose deliberation.
In one corner Savi and Anand were rolling out sacks and sheets on which to sleep.
“You come,” Shama said. “You come, you didn’t look right, you didn’t look left, you start
getting on, you curse me upside down–”
It was the beginning of her apology. He didn’t interrupt.
“You didn’t know what I had to put up with. Talking night and day. Puss-puss here. Puss-puss
there. Chinta dropping remarks all the time. Everybody beating their children the moment they start
talking to Savi. Nobody wanting to talk to me. Everybody behaving as though I kill their father.”
She stopped, and cried. “So I had to satisfy them. I break up the dolly-house and everybody was
satisfied. And then you come. You didn’t look right, you didn’t look left–”
“Charge of the Light Brigade. You think Chinta would break up a dolly-house Govind buy? If
you could imagine Govind doing anything like that. Tell me, what does that brother-in-law of yours
use for food, eh? Dirt? You think Chinta would break up a dolly-house Govind buy?”
She wept over her plate.
Later she wept over the washingup, repeatedly interrupting her tears, first to blow her nose,
then to sing sad songs softly, and finally to ask about Savi’s behaviour during the week.
He told how Savi had thrown away the old woman’s food. Shama was gratified, and told
other stories of the girl’s sensibility. Savi, still anxiously awake and only pretending to be asleep,
listened with pleasure. Again Shama told of Savi’s dislike for fish and how Mrs. Tulsi had
overcome that dislike. She also spoke of Anand, who was so sensitive that biscuits made his mouth
bleed.
Mr. Biswas, his mood now soft as hers, did not say that he thought this to be a sign of
undernourishment. Instead he began to talk about his house and Shama listened without enthusiasm
but without objection.
“And as soon as the house finish, going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!”
“I would like to see the day.”
They had come on Saturday. On Monday Savi had to go back to school.
“Stay here,” Mr. Biswas said. “They don’t teach much on the first day.”
“How you know?” Savi said. “You ever went to school?”
“Yes, miss. I went to school. You are not the only one to go to school, you know.”
“If I stay I will have to have an excuse to give Teacher.”
“I will write one for you in two twos. Dear Teacher, My daughter Savi is unable to attend
school for the first week because she has been staying with her grandmother and is suffering from
serious undernourishment.”
On Sunday evening Shama took Savi and Anand back to Arwacas. She went to Hanuman
House again. And so for the rest of the term she came and left; and he never ceased to feel that he
was alone, with the trees, the newspapers on the wall, the religious quotations, his books.
One thing gave him comfort. He had claimed Savi.
At Easter he learned that Shama was pregnant for the fourth time.
One child claimed; one still hostile; one unknown. And now another.
Trap!
The future he feared was upon him. He was falling into the void, and that terror, known only
in dreams, was with him as he lay awake at nights, hearing the snores and creaks and the occasional
cries of babies from the other rooms. The relief that morning brought steadily diminished. Food and
tobacco were tasteless. He was always tired, and always restless. He went often to Hanuman House;
as soon as he was there he wanted to leave. Sometimes he cycled to Arwacas without going to the
house, changing his mind in the High Street, turning round and cycling back to Green Vale. When
he closed the door of his room for the night it was like an imprisonment.
He talked to himself, shouted, did everything as noisily as he could.
Nothing replied. Nothing changed. Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when . The
newspapers remained as jaunty as they had been, the quotations as sedate. Of him I will never lose
hold and he shall never lose hold of me . But now in the shape and position of everything around
him, the trees, the furniture, even those letters he had made with brush and ink, there was an
alertness, an expectancy.
Seth announced one Saturday that there were to be changes on the estate at the end of the crop
season. Some twenty acres which had for many years been rented to labourers were to be taken
over. Seth and Mr. Biswas went from hut to hut, breaking the news. As soon as he entered a
labourer’s hut Seth lost his briskness. He looked tired and sounded tired; he accepted a cup of tea
and drank it wearily; then he spoke, as though the matter was trivial, burdensome only to him, and
the land was being taken from the labourers purely for their benefit. The labourers listened politely
and asked Seth and Mr. Biswas whether they wanted more tea. Seth accepted at once, saying it was
very good tea. He played with the thin-limbed, big-eyed children, made them laugh and gave them
coppers to buy sweeties. Their parents protested he was spoiling them.
Afterwards Seth said to Mr. Biswas, “You can’t trust those buggers. They are going to give a
lot of trouble. You better watch out.”
The labourers never spoke about the land to Mr. Biswas, and while the crop was being reaped
there was no trouble.
When the land was bare Seth said, “They will want to dig up the roots. Don’t let them.”
It was not long before Mr. Biswas had to report that some roots had been dug up.
Seth said, “It looks as though I will have to horsewhip one or two of them.”
“No, not that. You go back every night to sleep safe and sound in Arwacas. I have to stay
here.”
In the end they decided to employ a watchman, and the land was prepared, without further
trouble, for the new crop.
“You think the whole thing worth it?” Mr. Biswas asked. “Paying watchman and everything?”
“In a year or so we wouldn’t have any trouble,” Seth said. “People get used to everything.”
And it seemed that Seth was.right. The dispossessed labourers, though they saw Mr. Biswas
every day, contented themselves with sending him messages by other labourers.
“Dookinan says that he know you have a kind heart and wouldn’t want to do anything to harm
him. Five children, you know.”
“Is not me,” Mr. Biswas said. “Is not my land. I just doing a job and drawing a salary.”
The labourers’ acceptance, at first touched with hope, turned to resignation. And resignation
turned to hostility, directed not against Seth, who was feared, but against Mr. Biswas. He was no
longer mocked; but no one smiled at him, and outside the fields he was ignored.
Every night he bolted himself in his room. As soon as he was still he felt the stillness around
him and he had to make movements to destroy the stillness, to challenge the alertness of the room
and the objects in it.
He was rocking hard on the creaking board one night when he thought of the power of the
rockers to grind and crush and inflict pain, on his hands and toes and the tenderer parts of his body.
He rose at once in agony, covering his groin with his hands, sucking hard on his teeth, listening to
the chair as, rocking, it moved sideways along the cambered plank. The chair fell silent. He looked
away from it. On the wall he saw a nail that could puncture his eye. The window could trap and
mangle. So could the door. Every leg of the green table could press and crush. The castors of the
dressing-table. The drawers. He lay face down on the bed, not wanting to see and, to drive out the
shapes of objects from his head, he concentrated on the shapes of letters, working out design after
design for the letter R. At last he fell asleep, with his hands covering the vulnerable parts of his
body, and wishing he had hands to cover himself all over. In the morning he was better; he had
forgotten his fears.
There had been many changes at Hanuman House, but though he went there two or three
times a week he noticed the changes as from a distance and felt in no way concerned. Marriage had
taken away one wave of children, among them the contortionist. Marriage had also overtaken the
elder god, though for some time it had looked as though he might be reprieved. The search among
the eligible families had failed to provide someone beautiful and educated and rich enough to
satisfy Mrs. Tulsi or her daughters, who, notwithstanding the chancy haste of their own marriages,
based solely on caste, thought that their brother’s bride should be chosen with a more appropriate
concern. For a short time afterwards a search was made for an educated, beautiful and rich girl from
a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that
any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided she had no Muslim taint. The oil
families, whatever their original condition, were too grand. So they searched among the families in
soft drinks, the families in ice, the transport families, the cinema families, the families in filling
stations. And at last, in a laxly Presbyterian family with one filling station, two lorries, a cinema and
some land, they found a girl. Each side patronized the other and neither suspected it was being
patronized; after smooth and swift negotiations the marriage took place in a registry office, and the
elder god, contrary to Hindu custom and the traditions of his family, did not bring his bride home,
but left Hanuman House for good, no longer talking of suicide, to look after the lorries, cinema,
land and filling station of his wife’s family.
His departure was followed by another. Mrs. Tulsi went to live in Port of Spain, not caring for
the younger god to be in that city by himself, and not trusting anyone else to look after him. She
bought not one house, but three: one to live in, two to rent out. She travelled up to Port of Spain
with the god every Sunday evening and came down with him every Friday afternoon.
During her absences the accepted degrees of precedence at Hanuman House lost some of their
meaning. Sushila, the widow, was reduced to nonentity. Many sisters attempted to seize power and
a number of squabbles ensued. Offended sisters ostentatiously looked after their own families,
sometimes even cooking separately for a day or two. Padma, Seth’s wife, alone continued to be
respected, but she showed no inclination to assert authority. Seth exacted the obedience of
everyone; he could not impose harmony. That was reestablished every week-end, when Mrs. Tulsi
and the younger god returned.
And just before the school holidays all quarrels were forgotten. The house was scrubbed and
cleaned, the brass polished and the yard tidied, as though to receive passing royalty; and the
brothers-in-law vied with one another in laying aside offerings for the god: a Julie mango, a bunch
of bananas, an especially large purple-skinned avocado pear.
Mr. Biswas brought nothing. Shama complained.
“And what about my son, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “He lost in the crowd? Who looking after
him? He not studying too?”
For, halfway through the term, Anand had begun to go to the mission school. He hated it. He
soaked his shoes in water; he was flogged and sent to school in wet shoes. He threw away Captain
Cutteridge’s First Primer and said it had been stolen; he was flogged and given another copy.
“Anand is a coward,” Savi told Mr. Biswas. “He still frightened of school. And you know
what Aunt Chinta say to him yesterday? ‘If you don’t look out you will come a grass-cutter just like
your father.’ “
“Grass-cutter! Look, look, Savi. The next time your aunt Chinta open that big mouth”–he
broke off, remembering grammar–“the next time she opens her big mouth–”
Savi smiled.
“–you just ask her whether she has ever read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.”
These were household names to Savi.
“Munnih-munnih-munnih,” Mr. Biswas muttered.
“Munnih-munnih?”
“Money. Checking munnih-munnih-munnih. That is the only way your mother’s family like
to get their fat little hands dirty. Look, the next time Chinta or anybody else says I am a grass-cutter,
you just tell them that it is better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher. You got that? Better to be
a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher.”
And he opened the campaign himself. He had seen some large blue-backed crabs scrambling
awkwardly about the black tank in the yard. “Whoo!” he said in the hall. “Those are big crabs in the
tank. Where did they come from?”
“Govind bought them for Mai and Owad,” Chinta said proudly.
“Bought them?” Mr. Biswas said. “Anybody would say that he caught them.”
When he next went to Hanuman House he found that Savi had delivered all his messages.
Chinta came straight up to him and said, with the mannishness she put on when Mrs. Tulsi
was away, “Brother-in-law, I want you to know that until you came to this house there were no
crab-catchers here.”
“Eh? No what?”
“Crab-catchers.”
“Crab-catchers? What about crab-catchers? You don’t have enough here?”
“Marcus Aurelius-Aurelius,” Chinta said, retreating to the kitchen. “Shama sister, I don’t
want to meddle in the way you are bringing up your children, but you are turning them into men and
women before their time.”
Mr. Biswas winked at Savi.
Presently Chinta came out to the hall again. She had obviously thought of something to say.
Sternly and needlessly she rearranged chairs and benches and straightened the photographs of
Pundit Tulsi and a huge Chinese calendar which showed a woman of sly beauty against a
background of tamed trees and waterfalls. “Savi,” Chinta said at last, and her voice was gentle, “you
reach first standard at school and you must know the poetry Captain Cutteridge have in that book. I
don’t think your father know it because I don’t think your father reach first standard.”
Mr. Biswas had not been brought up on Captain Cutteridge but on the Royal Reader .
Nevertheless he said, “First standard? I skipped that one. I went straight from Introductory to
second standard.”
“I thought so, brother-in-law. But you, Savi, you know the poetry I mean. The one about
felo-de-se . The little pigs. You know it?”
“I know it! I know it!” a boy exclaimed. This was Jai, the expert lace-knotter, fourteen
months younger than Savi. He had developed into something of an exhibitionist. He ran to the
centre of the hall, held his hands behind his back and said, “The Three Little Piggies. By Sir Alfred
Scott-Gatty.”
A jolly old sow once lived in a sty.
And three little piggies had she,
And she waddled about, saying, “Umph! Umph! Utnph!”
While the little ones said, “Wee! Wee!”
”My dear little brothers,” said one of the brats,
”My dear little piggies,” said he,
”Let us all for the future say, ‘Umph! Umph! Umph!’
”Tis so childish to say, ‘Wee! Wee!’”
While Jai recited Chinta moved her head up and down in time to the rhythm and stared
smilingly at Savi.
“So after a time,” Jai went on,
So after a time these little pigs died,
They all died of “felo-de-se”,
From trying too hard to say, “Umph! Umph! Umph!”
When they could only say, “Wee! Wee!”
“A moral there is to this little song,” Chinta said, continuing the poem with Jai and wagging
her finger at Savi. “A moral that’s easy to see.”
“Felo-de-se ?” Mr. Biswas said. “Sounds like the name of a crab-catcher to me.”
Chinta stamped, irritated as when she lost at cards, and, looking as though she was about to
cry, went back to the kitchen.
“Shama sister,” Mr. Biswas heard her say in a breaking voice, “I want you to ask your
husband to stop provoking me. Otherwise I will just have to tell him ”–her husband, Govind–“and
you know what happened when he had a little falling-out with your husband.”
“All right, Chinta sister, I will tell him.”
Shama came out and said, with annoyance, “Man, stop provoking C. You know she can’t take
jokes.”
“Jokes? What jokes? Crab-catching is no joke, you hear.”
Chinta had her revenge a few days later.
Mr. Biswas arrived at Hanuman House when the evening meal was over and the children
were sitting about the hall in groups of three or four, reading primers or pretending to read. One of
the economies of the house was that as many children as possible shared a book; and the children
were talking among themselves and trying to hide the fact by holding their hands over their mouths
and turning pages regularly. When Mr. Biswas came they looked at him with amusement and
expectancy.
Chinta smiled. “You have come to see your son, brother-in-law?”
A rustle of turning pages coincided with many muffled titters.
Savi left a group around a book and came to Mr. Biswas. She looked unhappy. “Anand
upstairs.” When they were halfway up she whispered, “He kneeling down.”
In the hall Chinta was singing.
“Kneeling down? What for?”
“He mess up himself at school today and had to leave.”
They went through the Book Room to the long room, which he and Shama had occupied after
their marriage. The lotus decorations on the wall were as faded as before; the Demerara window
through which he had gargled was propped open with a section of a broomstick.
Anand was kneeling in a corner with his face to the wall.
“He kneeling down since this afternoon,” Savi said.
Mr. Biswas didn’t feel this was true. Anand had been left to himself, and was now kneeling
upright, without a sign of fatigue, as though he had just begun.
“Stop kneeling,” Mr. Biswas said.
He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. “They tell me to kneel down and
I going to kneel down.”
It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder
blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in
small, loose trousers; the blackened soles–shoes were to be worn only outside the house–and the big
toes.
“He was frightened,” Savi said.
“To do what?”
“Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was
frightened again. Frightened to use the school we.”
“Is a nasty , stinking place ,” Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.
“It really is,” Savi said. “And then–well–”
Anand cried.
“He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.”
Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between
the floorboards.
“Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was
laughing.”
“And when I come home Ma beat me,” Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry.
“Ma beat me. She beat me.” Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.
Mr. Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s,
caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.
Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, “I don’t want to go back to
that school.”
“You want to come with me?”
Anand didn’t reply.
They all went down to the hall.
Mr. Biswas said, “Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.”
Sushila, the widow, said, “When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a
thing like that.”
“Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.”
Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs. Tulsi, swept upstairs,
complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.
Chinta said, “You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?”
Shama, noting Mr. Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, “Anand not going anywhere. He got to
stay here and go to school.”
“Why?” Chinta asked. “Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the ABC.”
“A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,” Mr. Biswas said.
Anand followed Mr. Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing;
he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr. Biswas was irritated by
his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged “home
clothes” which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s
washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty
fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the
irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr. Biswas could tell that the shirt had
been made by Shama.
He asked, “You want to come with me?”
Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.
It would soon be dark. Mr. Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump
he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their
way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag in one hand.
He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign,
he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the
lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr. Biswas had seen outside a low hut at
dusk.
When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the
barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a
shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on
the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees ringed the barracks,
a wall of flawless black.
He locked himself in his room.
That week he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Unless he started his house now he never
would. His children would stay at Hanuman House, he would remain in the barrack-room, and
nothing would arrest his descent into the void. Every night he wound himself up to a panic at his
inaction, every morning he reaffirmed his decision, and on Saturday he spoke to Seth about a site.
“Rent you land?” Seth said. “Rent? Look, man, there is the land. Why don’t you just choose a
site and build? Don’t talk to me about renting.”
The site Mr. Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened
from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy
water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his
house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a “bower”, a word that
had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the Royal Reader .
On Sunday morning, after he had had some cocoa, shop bread and red butter, he went to see
the builder. The builder lived in a crumbling wooden house in a small Negro settlement not far from
Arwacas. Just over the gutter a badly-written notice board announced that George Maclean was a
carpenter and cabinet-maker; this announcement was choked by much subsidiary information
scattered all over the board in small and wavering letters; Mr. Maclean was also a blacksmith and a
painter; he made tin cups and he soldered; he sold fresh eggs; he had a ram for service; and all his
prices were keen.
Mr. Biswas called, “Morning!”
From the shack in the hard yellow yard a Negro woman came out, a large calabash full of
corn in one hand. Her tight cotton dress imperfectly covered her big body and her kinky hair was in
curlers and twists of newspaper.
“The carpenter home?” Mr. Biswas asked.
The woman called, “Georgie!” For a fat woman her voice was surprisingly thin.
Mr. Maclean appeared above the half-door at the side of the house. He looked at Mr. Biswas
suspiciously.
The woman walked to the far end of the yard, scattering corn and clucking loudly, calling the
poultry to feed.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know how to begin. He couldn’t just say, “I want to build a house.” He
didn’t have all the necessary money and he didn’t want to deceive Mr. Maclean or expose himself
to his scorn. He said shyly, “I have a little business I want to talk to you about.”
Mr. Maclean pushed open the lower half of the door and came down the concrete steps. He
was middle-aged, tall and thin; he looked as eager and uncertain as his board. His profession was a
frustrating one. The county abounded in work he had not been allowed to finish: exposed and
rotting house-frames, houses that had begun with concrete and dressed wood and ended with mud
walls and tree branches. Evidence of his compensating activities lay about the yard. In an open shed
at the back a half-finished wheel stood amid shavings. Here and there Mr. Biswas saw goat
droppings.
“What sort of business?” Mr. Maclean asked. He reached up and pulled a window open. It
rattled and glittered; it was hung on the inside with strings of tin cups.
“Is about a house.”
“Oh. Repairs?”
“Not exactly. It ain’t build yet. As a matter of fact–”
“Georgie!” Mrs. Maclean shouted. “Come and see what that damn mongoose do again.”
Mr. Maclean went to the back of the house. Mr. Biswas heard him mumbling evenly. “Damn
nuisance,” he said, coming back, striking his trousers with a switch. “So, you want me to build a
house for you?”
Mr. Biswas mistook his wariness for sarcasm and said defensively, “Is not a mansion.”
“That is a blessing. Too much people putting up mansion these days. You ever had a close
look at the County Road?” He paused. “Upstairs house?”
Mr. Biswas nodded. “Upstairs house. Small thing. But neat. I don’t want too much to make
me happy,” he ran on, made uneasy by Mr. Maclean. “I don’t see any point in pretending that you
have more money than you really have.”
“Naturally,” Mr. Maclean said. With the switch he flicked some fowl droppings from the yard
into the thick dust under the floor of his own house. Then he drew two equal and adjacent squares
on the ground. “You want two bedrooms.”
“And a drawingroom.”
Mr. Maclean added another square of the same size. To this he added half a square and said,
“And a gallery.”
“That’s it. Nothing too fancy for me. Small and neat.”
“You want a door from the gallery to the front bedroom. A wood door. And you want another
door to the drawing-room. With coloured glass panes.”
“Yes, yes.”
“One side of the gallery you want board up. For the front you would like some fancy rails.
You want a nice concrete step with a banister in front.”
“Yes, yes.”
“For the front bedroom you want glass windows, and if you get the money you going to paint
them white. The back windows could be pure board. And you want a plain wood staircase at the
back, with no banister or anything like that. The kitchen you going to build yourself, somewhere in
the yard.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s a nice little house you have there. A lot of people would like it. It going to cost you
about two hundred and fifty, three hundred dollars. Labour, you know–” He looked at Mr. Biswas
and slowly rubbed a bare foot over the drawing on the ground. “I don’t know. I busy these days.”
He pointed to the unfinished wheel in the shed.
A hen cackled, proclaiming an egg.
“Georgie! Is the Leghorn.”
There was a tremendous squawking and flapping among the poultry.
Mr. Maclean said, “Is a lucky thing. Otherwise she was going straight in the pot.”
“We not bound and “bliged to build the whole thing right away,” Mr. Biswas said. “Rome
wasn’t built in a day, you know.”
“So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and
we could look at the site. You have a site?”
“Yes, yes, man. Have a site.”
“Well, in about two-three days then.”
He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the
site.
“Is a real little bower,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Is a sloping site!” Mr. Maclean said in surprise and almost with pleasure. “You really have to
have high pillars.”
“High on one side, low on the other. It could practically be a style. And then I was thinking
about a little path down to the road here. Steps. In the ground itself. Garden on both sides. Roses.
Exora. Oleanders. Bougainvillaea and poinsettia. And some Queen of Flowers. And a neat little
bamboo bridge to the road.”
“It sound nice.”
“I was thinking. About the house. It would be nice to have concrete pillars. Not naked though.
I don’t think that does look nice. Plastered and smooth.”
“I know what you mean. You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars just
to start off with?”
Mr. Biswas hesitated.
“You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much
you want to spend right away.”
Mr. Biswas walked away from Mr. Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds
and the nettles. “About a hundred,” he said. “But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit
more.”
“A hundred.”
“All right?”
“Yes, is all right. For a start.”
They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.
“Every month we build a little,” Mr. Biswas said. “Little by little.”
“Yes, little by little.” Mr. Maclean wasn’t animated, but some of his wariness had gone; he
even sounded encouraging. “I will have to get some labour. Helluva thing these days, getting good
labour.” He spoke the word with relish.
And the word pleased Mr. Biswas too. “Yes, you must get labour,” he said, suppressing his
astonishment that there were people who depended on Mr. Maclean for a living.
“But you better get a few more cents quick.” Mr. Maclean said, almost friendly now.
“Otherwise you wouldn’t get any concrete pillars.”
“Must have concrete pillars.”
“Then all the house you going to build will be a row of concrete pillars with nothing on top of
them.”
They walked on.
“A row of coal barrels,” Mr. Biswas said.
Mr. Maclean didn’t intrude.
“Just send me a coal barrel. Yes, you old bitch. Just a coal barrel.”
He decided to borrow the money from Ajodha. He didn’t want to ask Seth or Mrs. Tulsi. And
he couldn’t ask Misir: their relationship had cooled since he had borrowed from him to pay
Mungroo and Seebaran and Mahmoud. And yet he was unwilling to go to Ajodha. He walked out of
the barrackyard but before he reached the main road decided to let the matter rest until the
following Sunday. He walked back to his room and put on his bicycle clips, thinking he would
spend the afternoon at Hanuman House instead. But he knew so clearly what he would find there
that he took off his bicycle clips. Eventually it was the room that drove him out. He caught two
buses and was at Pagotes in the late afternoon.
He entered Tara’s yard through the wide side gate of unpainted corrugated iron and went
down the gravelled way to the garage and the cowpen. Nothing in this part of the yard seemed to
have changed since he had first seen it. The plum tree was as desolate as ever; it bore fruit regularly
but its grey branches were almost bare and looked dry and stiff and brittle. He no longer wondered
what would be done with the heap of scrap metal, and he had given up the hope, which he had had
as a boy, of seeing the rusting body of a motorcar reanimated and driven away. The mound of
manured grass changed in size but remained where it always had been. For despite the cost and the
trouble, and the multiplication of his business interests, Ajodha still kept two or three cows in his
yard. They were his pets; he spent most of his free time in the cowpen, which he could never finish
improving.
From the cowpen came the hiss of milk in a bucket and the mumble of conversation. It was
Sunday; Ajodha would certainly be in the cowpen. Mr. Biswas didn’t look. He hurried to the back
verandah, hoping to see Tara first and to catch her alone.
She was alone, except for the servant girl. She greeted him so warmly that he at once felt
ashamed of his mission. His resolve to speak directly came to nothing, for when he asked how she
was she replied at length and, instead of asking for money, he had to give sympathy. Indeed, she
didn’t look well. Her breathing had grown worse and she couldn’t move about easily; her body had
broadened and become slack; her hair had thinned; her eyes had lost their brightness.
The servant girl brought him a cup of tea and Tara followed the girl back to the kitchen.
The top shelves of the bookcase were still packed with the disintegrating volumes of The
Book of Comprehensive Knowledge , for which Ajodha had not paid. The lower shelves contained
magazines, motor manufacturers’ catalogues and illustrated trilingual souvenir booklets of Indian
films. The religious pictures on the walls were crowded out by calendars from the distributors of
American and English motor vehicles, and an enormous framed photograph of an Indian actress.
Tara came back to the verandah and said that she hoped Mr. Biswas would stay to dinner. He
had intended to; apart from everything else, he liked their food. She sat down in Ajodha’s
rockingchair and asked after the children. He told her about the one that was coming. She asked
about the Tulsis and he replied as briefly as he could. He knew that, though the two houses had little
to do with one another, an antagonism existed between them. The Tulsis, who did puja every day
and celebrated every Hindu festival, regarded Ajodha as a man who pursued wealth and comfort
and modernity and had alienated himself from the faith. Ajodha and Tara simply thought the Tulsis
squalid, and had always made it clear that they considered Mr. Biswas’s marriage into that house a
calamity. It was doubly embarrassing to Mr. Biswas to discuss the Tulsis with Tara, since despite
his concern for his children he found it hard not to agree with her view, particularly when he was in
her clean, uncrowded, comfortable house, waiting for a meal he knew would be good.
The cowman came from the pen, called to the girl in the kitchen and passed her the bucket of
milk through the window. Then, at the standpipe in the yard he washed his Wellingtons, took them
off, washed his feet and hands and face.
Mr. Biswas felt more and more reluctant to tell Tara what he had come for.
Then it was too late. Rabidat, Bhandat’s younger son, came in, and Tara and Mr. Biswas fell
silent. As far as Tara and Ajodha were concerned, Rabidat was still a bachelor, though it was
generally known that, like his brother Jagdat, he was living with a woman of another race and had
some children, no one knew how many, by her. He was wearing sandals and brief khaki shorts; his
tailless shirt flapped loose, unbuttoned all the way down, the short sleeves rolled up almost to his
armpits. It was as though, unable to hide his prognathous face, he wished to display the rest of
himself as well. He had a superb body, well proportioned and well developed and not grossly
muscular. He barely nodded to Mr. Biswas and ignored Tara. When he sat sprawling on a chair, two
thin folds of skin appeared about his middle; they were almost a disfigurement of his neatness. He
sucked his teeth, took a film booklet from the bookcase and flicked through it, breathing loudly, his
small eyes intent, his prognathous sneer more pronounced. He threw the booklet back on the
bookcase and said, “How is everything, Mohun?” Without waiting for an answer he shouted at the
kitchen, “Food, girl!” and clamped his mouth shut.
“Ooh! The married man!”
It was Ajodha, back from the cowpen.
Rabidat rearranged his legs.
Before Mr. Biswas could reply, Ajodha stopped smiling and spoke to Rabidat about the
behaviour of a certain lorry.
Rabidat shifted in his chair and sucked his teeth, not looking up.
Ajodha raised his voice querulously.
Rabidat explained awkwardly, sulkily, insolently. He seemed to be trying to bite the inside of
his lower lip, and his voice, though deep, was blurred.
Abruptly Ajodha lost interest in the lorry and smiled mischievously at Mr. Biswas.
Tara got up from the rockingchair and Ajodha sat in it, fanning his face and opening a shirt
button to reveal a grey-haired chest. “How many children has the married man got now? Seven,
eight, a dozen?”
Rabidat smiled uneasily, got up and went to the kitchen.
Mr. Biswas thought he would be brave and begin. “Late last night,” he said, “some “larmist
bring me a message that my mother was very sick. So I came to see her today and as I was here I
thought I would come and see you.”
The servant girl brought a glass of milk for Ajodha. He received it reverentially, holding the
glass as though any pressure might cause it to break. He said, “Bring Mohun some. You know,
Mohun, milk is a food in itself, especially when it is fresh like this.”
The milk was brought and drunk. Mr. Biswas welcomed the pause. The absurd story he
hadjust made up didn’t sound convincing, and he hoped he would be allowed to drop it.
“And how was your mother?” Tara asked. “I heard nothing.”
“Oh, she. She was all right. It was just some “larmist, that was all.”
Ajodha rocked gently. “What about your job, Mohun? Somehow I never felt you were made
for a job in the fields. Eh, Tara?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” Mr. Biswas said briskly, “it was that I wanted to talk to you about.
You see, this is a steady job–”
Ajodha said, “Mohun, I don’t think you are looking well at all. Eh, Tara? Look at his face.
And, eh–” He broke off with a giggle and said in English, “Look, look. He getting a punch.” He
stabbed at Mr. Biswas’s belly with a long sharp finger, and when Mr. Biswas winced Ajodha gave a
little yelping laugh. “Pap,” he said. “Your belly soft like pap. Like a woman. All you young people
getting bellies these days.” He winked at Mr. Biswas; then, tilting back his head, he said loudly,
“Even Rabidat got a punch.”
Tara gave a short, chesty laugh.
Rabidat came out of the kitchen, chewing, his mouth full, and mumbled incomprehensibly.
Ajodha grimaced, “Take your face back to the kitchen. You know you make me ill when you
talk with your mouth full.”
Rabidat swallowed hurriedly. “Punch?” he said, nibbling at his lower lip. “I got a punch?” He
pulled his shirt off his shoulders, drew in his breath and the definitions of his abdominal muscles
became sharper. Above his sneering mouth his small eyes glittered.
Smiling, Ajodha said, “All right, Rabidat. Go back and eat. I was only teasing.” The
demonstration had pleased him; he was as proud of Rabidat’s body as of his own. “Good food,” he
told Mr. Biswas. “And lots of exercise.” He threw back his shoulders, stuck out his stomach,
grabbed Mr. Biswas’s soft hand with his firm, long fingers and said, “Feel that. Come on, feel it.”
Mr. Biswas didn’t respond. Ajodha seized one of Mr. Biswas’s fingers and pulled it hard against his
stomach. Mr. Biswas felt his finger bend backwards; he wrenched it from Ajodha’s grasp. “There,”
Ajodha said. “Hard as steel. You still sleep with a pillow, I imagine?”
Surreptitiously rubbing his paining finger against its neighbour, Mr. Biswas nodded.
“I never use a pillow. Nature didn’t intend us to use pillows. Train your children from the
start, Mohun. Don’t let them use pillows. Ooh! Four children!” Ajodha gave another little yelp of
laughter, jumped out of his chair, walked to the verandah half-wall and shouted irritably to someone
outside. He had heard the cowman preparing to leave and was only bidding him good night; that
was the voice he always used with his employees. The cowman replied and Ajodha returned to his
chair. “Married man!”
“Well, as I was saying,” Mr. Biswas said, “this job I have is steady. And I am beginning to
build a little house.”
“O good, Mohun,” Tara said. “Very good.”
“I don’t know how you managed to live at Hanuman House,” Ajodha said. “How many
people live in that place?”
“About two hundred,” Mr. Biswas said, and they all laughed. “Now, this house is going to be
a proper house–”
“You know what you should do, Mohun?” Ajodha said. “You should take Sanatogen. Not one
bottle. Take the full course. You don’t get any benefit unless you take the full course.”
Tara nodded.
Rabidat came out of the kitchen again. “What is this I hear about a house, Mohun? You build
a house? Where you get all this money from?”
“He has been saving up,” Ajodha said impatiently. “Not like you. You are going to end up
living in a hole in the ground, Rabidat. I don’t know what you do with your money.” It was only
indirectly, like this, that Ajodha referred to Rabidat’s outside life.
“Look. You!” Rabidat said. “I wasn’t born with money, you hear. And I don’t have the
scheming mind to make any. My father neither.” He was being provocative, since any mention of
his father, like any mention of Mr. Biswas’s sister, was forbidden.
Ajodha frowned and rocked violently.
And Mr. Biswas realized that the time to ask had gone for good.
Ajodha’s look wasn’t the one he assumed so easily, of worry and petulance, which meant
nothing, though it filled his employees with dread. It was a look of anger.
Ignoring Ajodha and smiling at Mr. Biswas, Rabidat asked, “A dirt house?”
“No, man. Concrete pillars. Two bedrooms and a drawing-room. Galvanized roof and
everything.”
But Rabidat wasn’t listening.
“Tara!” Ajodha said. “If I didn’t take him out of the gutter, where would he be today? If I
didn’t feed him all that food”–rising so swiftly that the rockingchair shot backwards, he went up to
Rabidat and held his biceps–“do you think he would have these?”
“Don’t touch me !” Rabidat bawled.
Mr. Biswas jumped. Ajodha whipped away his hand.
“Don’t touch me!” Tears sprang to Rabidat’s small eyes. He closed them tightly, as if in great
pain, lifted one foot high and brought it down with all his strength on the floor. “You didn’t make
me. If you want to touch children, make them. What you want me to do with the food you feed me?
What?”
Tara got up and passed her hand on Rabidat’s back. “All right, all right, Rabidat. It is time for
you to go to the theatre.” One of his duties was to go to the cinema twice a day to check the takings.
Breathing hard, almost grunting, and chewing up his words into incomprehensible sounds, he
went up the two steps that led from the back verandah to the main section of the house.
Ajodha pulled the rockingchair towards him, sat on it and began to rock briskly.
Tara smiled at Mr. Biswas. “I don’t know what to do with them, Mohun.”
“Gratitude!” Ajodha said.
“Tell us about your house, Mohun,” Tara said.
“You take them out of a barrackroom and this is what you get.”
“House?” Mr. Biswas said. “Oh, is nothing really. A small little thing. Is for the children sake
that I really building it.”
“We want to build over this house,” Tara said. “But the trouble! The moment you want to put
up anything good, so many forms, so many people’s permission. When we built this house we had
nothing like that. But I don’t imagine you have that worry.”
“O no,” Mr. Biswas said. “No worry about that at all.”
With those light, precise motions on which he prided himself, Ajodha jumped out of his chair
and went through the half-door into the yard.
“Those two,” Tara said. “Always quarrelling. But they don’t mean anything. Tomorrow they
will be like father and son.”
They heard Ajodha in the cowpen abusing the absent cowman.
Jagdat, Rabidat’s elder brother, came in and asked in his cheerful way, “Something eating
your husband, Aunt?” and chuckled.
Whenever Mr. Biswas saw Jagdat he felt that Jagdat had just come from a funeral. Not only
was his manner breezy; there was also his dress, which had never varied for many years: black
shoes, black socks, dark blue serge trousers with a black leather belt, white shirt cuffs turned up
above the wrist, and a gaudy tie: so that it seemed he had come back from a funeral, taken off his
coat, undone his cuffs, replaced his black tie, and was generally making up for an afternoon of
solemnity. His eyes were as small as Rabidat’s, but livelier; his face was squarer; he laughed more
often, showing rabbitlike teeth. With a hairy ringed hand he slapped Mr. Biswas hard on the back,
saying, “The old Mohun, man!”
“The old Jagdat,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Mohun is building a house,” Tara said.
“Has he come to invite us to the housewarming? We only see you at Christmas, man. You
don’t eat the rest of the year? Or is because of all the money you making?” And Jagdat roared with
laughter.
Ajodha came back from the cowpen and he and Mr. Biswas and Jagdat ate in the verandah.
Tara ate by herself in the kitchen. Ajodha was silent and sullen, Jagdat subdued. The food was good
but Mr. Biswas ate without pleasure.
He had hoped that after the meal he would get Tara alone. But Ajodha remained rocking in
the verandah and after a little Mr. Biswas thought the time had come to leave. The girl had finished
washing up in the kitchen, and the night silence made it seem later than it was.
Tara said he should take back some fruit for the children.
“Vitamin C,” Ajodha said, in his irritable voice. “Give him lots of vitamin C, Tara.”
She obediently filled a bag with oranges.
Then Ajodha went inside.
As soon as he had gone Tara put some avocado pears into the bag, large purple-skinned ones
such as, at Hanuman House, were set aside for Mrs. Tulsi and the god. “They will get ripe soon,”
she said. “The children will like them.”
He didn’t want to explain where the children lived and where he lived. But he was glad he
hadn’t asked her for money.
“I am sorry your uncle was in such a temper,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean anything. The
boys are being a little difficult. They want money from him all the time and you can’t blame him for
getting angry sometimes. They are spreading all sorts of stories about him, too. He doesn’t say
anything. But he knows.”
Mr. Biswas went to say good-bye to Ajodha. His room was in darkness, the door was open,
and Ajodha was lying on his pillowless bed with all his clothes on. Mr. Biswas knocked lightly and
there was no reply. The ledges on the walls were littered with papers. The room had only four
pieces of furniture: the bed, a chair, a low chest of drawers and a black iron chest, the top of which
was also covered with papers and magazines. Mr. Biswas was about to go away when he heard
Ajodha say gently, “I am not asleep, Mohun. But these days I always rest after eating. You mustn’t
mind if I don’t talk or get up.”
On the way to the Main Road to get a bus Mr. Biswas was hailed by someone. It was Jagdat.
He put his hand on Mr. Biswas’s shoulder and conspiratorially offered a cigarette. Ajodha forbade
smoking and for Jagdat a cigarette was still an excitement.
Jagdat said breezily, “You come to squeeze something out of the old man, eh?”
“What? Me? I just come to see the old people, man.”
“That wasn’t what the old man tell me.”
Jagdat waited, then clapped Mr. Biswas on the back.
“But I didn’t tell him anything.”
“The old Mohun, man. Trying out the old diplomatic tactic, eh. The old tic-tac-toe.”
“I wasn’t trying out anything.”
“No, no. You mustn’t think I look down on you for trying. What else you think I doing every
day? But the old man sharp, boy. He could smell a thing like that before you even start thinking
about it. So what, eh? You still building this house for the children sake?”
“You build one for yours?”
There was a sudden abatement of Jagdat’s high spirits. He stopped, half turned, as though
about to go back, and raising his voice, said angrily, “So they spreading stories about me, eh? To
you?” He bawled, “O God ! I going to go back and knock out all their false teeth. Mohun ! You
hearing me?”
The melodramatic flair seemed to run through the family. Mr. Biswas said, “They didn’t tell
me anything. But don’t forget that I know you since you was a boy. And if is still the old Jagdat I
imagine you have enough outside children now to make up your own little school.”
Jagdat, still in the attitude of return, relaxed. They walked on.
“Just four or five,” Jagdat said.
“How you mean, four or five?”
“Well, four.” Some ofjagdat’s bounce had gone and when, after some time, he spoke again, it
was in an elegiac voice. “Boy, I went to see my father last week. The man living in a small concrete
room in Henry Street in a ramshackle old house full of creole people. And, and”–his voice was
rising again–“that son of a bitch”–he was screaming–“that son of a bitch not doing a damn thing to
help him.”
In lighted windows curtains were raised. Mr. Biswas plucked at Jagdat’s sleeve.
Jagdat dropped his voice to one of melancholy piety. “You remember the old man, Mohun?”
Mr. Biswas remembered Bhandat well.
“His face,” Jagdat said, “come small small.” He half-closed his small eyes and bunched the
fingers of one hand raised in a gesture so delicate it might have been made by a pundit at a religious
ceremony. “O yes,” he went on, “Ajodha always ready to give you vitamin A and vitamin B. But
when it come to any real sort of help, don’t go to him. Look. He employ a gardener one time. Old
man, wearing rags, thin, sick, practically starving. Indian like you and me. Thirty cents a day. Thirty
cents! Still, poor man can’t do better, in all the hot sun the old man working. Doing his little
weeding and hoeing. About three o”clock, sun hot like blazes, sweating, back aching as if it want to
break, he ask for a cup of tea. Well, they give him a cup of tea. But at the end of the day they dock
six cents off his pay.”
Mr. Biswas said, “You think they going to send me a bill for the food they give me?”
“Laugh if you want. But that is the way they treat poor people. My consolation is that they
can’t bribe God. God is good, boy.”
They were in the Main Road, not far from the shop where Mr. Biswas had served under
Bhandat. The shop was now owned by a Chinese and a large signboard proclaimed the fact.
The moment came to separate from Jagdat. But Mr. Biswas was unwilling to leave him, to be
alone, to get on the bus to go back through the night to Green Vale.
Jagdat said, “The first boy bright like hell, you know.”
It was some seconds before Mr. Biswas realized that Jagdat was talking about one of his
celebrated illegitimate children. He saw anxiety in Jagdat’s broad face, in the bright jumping little
eyes.
“I glad,” Mr. Biswas said. “Now you could get him to read That Body of Yours to you.”
Jagdat laughed. “The same old Mohun.”
There was no need to ask where Jagdat was going. He was going to his family. He too, then,
lived a divided life.
“She does work in a office,” Jagdat said, anxious again.
Mr. Biswas was impressed.
“Spanish,” Jagdat said.
Mr. Biswas knew this was a euphemism for a red-skinned Negro. “Too hot for me, man.”
“But faithful,” Jagdat said.
Knocked about on the wooden seat of the rackety rickety dim-lit bus, going past silent fields
and past houses which were lightless and dead or bright and private, Mr. Biswas no longer thought
of the afternoon’s mission, but of the night ahead.
Early next morning Mr. Maclean turned up at the barracks and said he had put off other
pressing work and was ready to go ahead with Mr. Biswas’s house. He was in his poor but
respectable business clothes. His ironed shirt was darned with almost showy neatness; his khaki
trousers were clean and sharply creased, but the khaki was old and would not keep the crease for
long.
“You decide how much you want to start off with?”
“A hundred,” Mr. Biswas said. “More at the end of the month. No concrete pillars.”
“Is only a sort of fanciness. You watch. I will get you a crapaud that would last a lifetime.
Wouldn’t make no difference.”
“Once it neat.”
“Neat and nice,” Mr. Maclean said. “Well, I suppose I better start seeing about materials and
labour.”
Materials came that afternoon. The crapaud pillars looked rough; they were not altogether
round or altogether straight. But Mr. Biswas was delighted by the new scantlings, and the new nails
that came in several wrappings of newspaper. He took up handfuls of nails and let them fall again.
The sound pleased him. “Did not know nails was so heavy,” he said.
Mr. Maclean had brought a tool-box which had his initials on the cover and was like a large
wooden suitcase. It contained a saw with an old handle and a sharp, oiled blade; several chisels and
drills; a spirit-level and a “I square; a plane; a hammer and a mallet; wedges with smooth, fringed
heads; a ball of old, white-stained twine; and a lump of chalk. His tools were like his clothes: old
but cared-for. He built a rough work-bench out of the materials and assured Mr. Biswas that all the
material would be eventually released for the house and would suffer little damage. That was why,
he explained in reply to another of Mr. Biswas’s queries, no nail had been driven right in.
The labour also came. The labour was a labourer named Edgar, a muscular, full-blooded
Negro whose short khaki trousers were shaggy with patches, and whose vest, brown with dirt, was
full of holes that had been distended by his powerful body into ellipses. Edgar cutlassed the site,
leaving it a rich wet green.
When Mr. Biswas returned from the fields he found the brushed site marked in white with the
plan of the house. Holes for pillars had been indicated and Edgar was digging. Not far off Mr.
Maclean had constructed a frame which rested level on stones and answered wonderfully to the
design he had drawn in his yard.
“Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom,” Mr. Biswas said, hopping over the spars.
“Gallery, bedroom, bedroom, drawingroom.”
The air smelled of sawdust. Sawdust had spilled rich red and cream on the grass and had been
ground into the damp black earth by Edgar’s bare feet and Mr. Maclean’s old, un-shining
working-boots.
Mr. Maclean talked to Mr. Biswas about the difficulties of labour.
“I try to get Sam,” he said. “But he a little too erratic and don’t-care. Edgar, now, does do the
work of two men. The only trouble is, you got to keep a eye on him all the time. Look at him.”
Edgar was knee-deep in a hole and regularly throwing up spadefuls of black earth.
“You got to tell him to stop,” Mr. Maclean said. “Otherwise, he dig right through till he come
out the other side. Well, boss, how about something to wet the job?” He made a drinking gesture. In
the early days he had preferred to drink on the completion of a job; now he got his drink as soon as
he could.
Mr. Biswas nodded and Mr. Maclean called, “Edgar!”
Edgar went on digging.
Mr. Maclean tapped his forehead. “You see what I tell you?” He put two fingers in his mouth
and whistled.
Edgar looked up and jumped out of his hole. Mr. Maclean asked him to go to the rumshop and
buy a nip of rum. Edgar ran to where his belongings were, seized a dusty, squashed aand
abbreviated felt hat, pressed it on his head and ran off. Some minutes later he came back, still
running, one hand holding a bottle, the other holding down his hat.
Mr. Maclean opened the bottle, said, “To you and the house, boss,” and drank. He passed the
bottle to Edgar, who said, “To you and the house, mister boss,” and drank without wiping the botde.
Mr. Maclean required much space when he worked. Next day he built another frame and left
it on the ground beside the frame of the floor. The new frame was of the back wall and Mr. Biswas
recognized the back door and the back window. Edgar finished digging the holes and set up three of
the crapaud pillars, making them firm with stones taken from a heap left by the Public Works
Department some distance away.
One thing puzzled Mr. Biswas. The materials had cost nearly eighty-five dollars. That left
fifteen dollars to be divided between Mr. Maclean and Edgar for work which, Mr. Maclean said,
would take from eight to ten days. Yet they were both cheerful; though Mr. Maclean had
complained, in a whisper, about the cost of labour.
That afternoon, when Mr. Maclean and Edgar left, Shama came.
“What is this I hear from Seth?”
He showed her the frames on the ground, the three erect pillars, the mounds of dirt.
“I suppose you use up every cent you had?”
“Every red cent,” Mr. Biswas said. “Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom.”
Her pregnancy was beginning to be prominent. She puffed and fanned. “Is all right for you.
But what about me and the children?”
“What you mean? They going to be ashamed because their father building a house?”
“Because their father trying to set himself up in competition with people who have a lot more
than him.”
He knew what was upsetting her. He could imagine the whisperings at the monkey house, the
puss-puss here, the puss-puss there. He said, “I know you want to spend all the days of your life in
that big coal barrel called Hanuman House. But don’t try to keep my children there.”
“Where you going to get the money to finish the house?”
“Don’t you worry your head about that. If you did worry a little bit more and a little bit
earlier, by now we might have a house.”
“You just gone and throw away your money. You want to be a pauper.”
“O God! Stop digging and digging at me like this!”
“Who digging? Look.” She pointed to Edgar’s mounds of earth. “You is the big digger.”
He gave an annoyed little laugh.
For some time they were silent. Then she said, “You didn’t even get a pundit or anything
before you plant the first pillar.”
“Look. I get enough good luck the last time Hari come and bless the shop. Remember that.”
“I not going to live in that house or even step inside it if you don’t get Hari to come and bless
it.”
“If Hari come and bless it, it wouldn’t surprise me if nobody at all even get a chance to live in
it.”
But she couldn’t undo the frames and the pillars, and in the end he agreed. She went back to
Hanuman House with an urgent message for Hari, and next morning Mr. Biswas told Mr. Maclean
to wait until Hari had done his business.
Hari came early, neither interested nor antagonistic, just constipatedly apathetic. He came in
normal clothes, with his pundit’s gear in a small cardboard suitcase. He bathed at one of the barrels
behind the barracks, changed into a dhoti in Mr. Biswas’s room and went to the site with a brass jar,
some mango leaves and other equipment.
Mr. Maclean had got Edgar to clean out a hole. In his thin voice Hari whined out the prayers.
Whining, he sprinkled water into the hole with a mango leaf and dropped a penny and some other
things wrapped in another mango leaf. Throughout the ceremony Mr. Maclean stood up
reverentially, his hat off.
Then Hari went back to the barracks, changed into trousers and shirt, and was off.
Mr. Maclean looked surprised. “That is all?” he asked. “No sharing-out of anything–food and
thing–as other Indians does do?”
“When the house finish,” Mr. Biswas said.
Mr. Maclean bore his disappointment well. “Naturally. I was forgetting.”
Edgar was putting a pillar into the consecrated hole.
Mr. Biswas said to Mr. Maclean, “Is a waste of a good penny, if you ask me.”
At the end of the week the house had begun to take shape. The floor-frame had been put on,
and the frames for the walls; the roof was outlined. On Monday the back staircase went up after Mr.
Maclean’s work-bench had been dismantled for its material.
Then Mr. Maclean said, “We going to come back when you get some more materials.”
Every day Mr. Biswas went to the site and examined the skeleton of the house. The wooden
pillars were not as bad as he had feared. From a distance they looked straight and cylindrical,
contrasting with the squareness of the rest of the frame, and he decided that this was practically a
style.
He had to get floorboards; he wanted pitchpine for that, not the five inch width, which he
thought common, but the two and a half inch, which he had seen in some ceilings. He had to get
boards for the walls, broad boards, with tongue-and-groove. And he had to get corrugated iron for
the roof, new sheets with blue triangles stamped on the silver, so that they looked like sheets of an
expensive stone rather than iron.
At the end of the month he set aside fifteen of his twenty-five dollars for the house. This was
extravagant; he was eventually left with ten.
At the end of the second month he could add only eight dollars.
Then Seth came up with an offer.
“The old lady have some galvanize in Ceylon,” he said. “From the old brick-factory.”
The factory had been pulled down while Mr. Biswas was living at The Chase.
“Five dollars,” Seth said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House.
“How is the house, brother-in-law?” Chinta asked.
“Why you asking? Hari bless it, and you know what does happen when Hari bless
something.”
Anand and Savi followed Mr. Biswas to the back, where everything was gritty with the chaff
from the new rice-mill next door, and the iron sheets were stacked like a very old pack of cards
against the fence. The sheets were of varying shapes, bent, warped and richly rusted, with corners
curled into vicious-looking hooks, corrugations irregularly flattened out, and nail-holes everywhere,
dangerous to the touch.
Anand said, “Pa, you not going to use that ?”
“You will make the house look like a shack,” Savi said.
“You want something to cover your house,” Seth said. “When you are sheltering from the rain
you don’t run outside to look at what is sheltering you. Take it for three dollars.”
Mr. Biswas thought again of the price of new corrugated iron, of the exposed frame of his
house. “All right,” he said. “Send it.”
Anand, who had been displaying more and more energy since his misadventure at school,
said, “All right ! Go ahead and buy it and put it on your old house. I don’t care what it look like
now.”
“Another little paddler,” Seth said.
But Mr. Biswas felt as Anand. He too didn’t care what the house looked like now.
When he got back to Green Vale he found Mr. Maclean.
They were both embarrassed.
“I was doing a job in Swampland,” Mr. Maclean said. “I was just passing by here and I
thought I would drop in.”
“I was going to come to see you the other day,” Mr. Biswas said. “But you know how it is. I
got about eighteen dollars. No, fifteen. I just went to Arwacas to buy some galvanize for the roof
“Just in time too, boss. Otherwise all the money you did spend woulda waste.”
“Not new galvanize, you know. I mean, not brand-brand new.”
“The thing about galvanize is that you could always make it look nice. You go be surprised
what a little bit of paint could do.”
“They have a few holes here and there. A few. Tiny tiny.”
“We could fix those up easy. Mastic cement. Not expensive, boss.”
Mr. Biswas noted the change in Mr. Maclean’s tone.
“Boss, I know you want pitchpine for the floor. I know pitchpine nice. It does look nice and it
does smell nice and it easy to keep clean. But you know it does burn easy. Easy, easy.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Mr. Biswas said. “At pujas we always use pitchpine.” To
burn the offerings in a quick, scented flame.
“Boss, I got some cedar planks. A man in Swampland offer me a whole pile of cedar for
seven dollars. Seven dollars for a hundred and fifty foot of cedar is a real bargain.”
Mr. Biswas hesitated. Of all wood cedar appealed to him least. The colour was pleasing but
the smell was acrid and clinging. It was such a soft wood that a fingernail could mark it and
splinters could be bitten off with teeth. To be strong it had to be thick; then its thickness made it
look ungainly.
“Now, boss, I know they is only rough planks. But you know me. When I finish planing them
they would be level level, and when I join them together you wouldn’t be able to slip a sheet of
bible-paper between them.”
“Seven dollars. That leave eight for you.” Mr. Biswas meant it was little to pay for laying a
floor and putting on a roof.
But Mr. Maclean was offended. “My labour,” he said.
The corrugated iron came that week-end on a lorry that also brought Anand and Savi and
Shama.
Anand said, “Aunt Sushila bawl off the men when they was loading the galvanize on the
lorry.”
“She tell them to throw them down hard, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that what she tell them?
She did want them to dent them up more, eh? Don’t frighten to tell me.”
“No, no. She say they wasn’t working fast enough.”
Mr. Biswas examined the sheets as they were unloaded, looking for bumps and dents he could
attribute to Sushila’s maliciousness. Whenever he saw a crack in the rust he stopped the loaders.
“Look at this. Which one of you was responsible for this? You know, I mad enough to get Mr.
Seth to dock your money.” That word “dock”, so official and ominous, he had got from Jagdat.
Stacked on the grass, the sheets made the site look like an abandoned lot. No corrugation of
one sheet fitted into the corrugation of any other; the pile rose high and shaky and awkward.
Mr. Maclean said, “I could straighten them out with the hammer. Now, about the rafters,
boss.”
Mr. Biswas had forgotten about those.
“Now, boss, you must look at it this way. The rafters don’t show from the outside. Only from
the inside. And even then, when you get a ceiling you could hide the rafters. So I think it would be
better and it would cost you nothing if you get tree-branches. When you trim them they does make
first-class rafters.”
And when Mr. Maclean set to work, he worked alone. Mr. Biswas never saw Edgar again and
never asked about him.
Mr. Maclean went to a “‘bandon”, brought back tree-branches and trimmed them into rafters.
He cut notches in the rafters wherever they were to rest on the main frame, and nailed them on.
They looked solid. He used thinner branches, limber, irregular and recalcitrant, for cross-rafters.
They looked shaky and reminded Mr. Biswas of the rafters of a dirt-and-grass hut.
Then the corrugated iron was nailed on. The sheets were dangerous to handle and the rafters
shook under Mr. Maclean’s weight and the blows of his hammer. The weeds below and the frame
became covered with rust. When Mr. Maclean had packed his tools into his wooden suitcase and
gone home for the day, it was a pleasure to Mr. Biswas to stand below the roof and be in shade
where only the day before, only that morning, there had been openness.
As the sheets went up, and they were enough to cover all the rooms except the gallery, the
house no longer looked so drab and un-begun. Mr. Maclean was right: the sheets did hide the
branch-rafters. But every hole in the roof glittered like a star.
Mr. Maclean said, “I did mention a thing called mastic cement. But that was before I did see
the galvanize. You would spend as much on mastic cement as on five-six sheets of new galvanize.”
“So what? I just got to sit down in my new house and get wet?”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way, as the people does say. Pitch. You did think about that? A
lot of people does use pitch.”
They got the pitch free, from a neglected part of the road where asphalt was laid on, without
gravel, in lavish lumps. Mr. Maclean put small stones over the holes in the roof and sealed them
down with pitch. He ran sealings of pitch along the edges of the sheets and down the cracks. It was
a slow, long job, and when he was finished the roof was curiously patterned in black with many
rough lines, straight down, angularly jagged across, and freaked and blobbed and gouted all over
with pitch, above the confused red, rust, brown, saffron, grey and silver of the old sheets.
But it worked. When it rained, as it was beginning to do now every afternoon, the ground
below the roof remained dry. Poultry from the barrackyard and other places came to shelter and
stayed to dig the earth into dust.
The cedar floorboards came, rough and brisdy, and impregnated the site with their smell.
When Mr. Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as
neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with
wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The
back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk
straight up to the bedroom.
Then Mr. Maclean said, “When you get more materials you must let me know.”
He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.
Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr. Biswas thought. Only five or six.
The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they
jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails
into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to
make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the
mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr. Biswas tried to
drive out the children.
“You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.”
As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr. Biswas began to
receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.
Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and dangerousness of the labourers, now only
said, “Don’t let them frighten you.”
But Mr. Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few
reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with
courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and
negligible.
He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a poui stick, one of his father’s, at
the side of his bed. And from Mrs. Seeung, the Chinese caf -owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a
hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy
whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in.
When Mr. Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its
eyes open. At Mr. Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.
He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly
and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. “The hens stop laying because of your dog,” the
poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck
in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then
one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in
bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the
owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with
egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr. Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle
smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.
The placards in Mr. Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using
black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult
decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.
Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader’s
Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at
Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt
stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers’ horses
that were draped with the colours of death every day.
The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn’t leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung
limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled
and died.
Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside
his room.
He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked
against the kitchen safe and table and Shama’s dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and
violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.
He saw nothing but the night, the still, colourless barrack-yard, the dead trees black against
the moonlit sky. Two rooms away a light was burning: someone was out, or a child was ill.
Then, making a lapping, happy sound, Tarzan was on the step, wagging his tail so hard it
struck against the lower half of the door.
He let him in and stroked him. His coat was damp.
Tarzan, overjoyed at the attention, stuck his muzzle against Mr. Biswas’s face.
“Egg!”
For a second Tarzan hesitated. No threat appearing, he redoubled his tail-wagging, continually
shifting his hind legs.
Mr. Biswas embraced him.
After that he always slept with his oil lamp on.
He began to fear that his house might be burned down. He went to bed with an added anxiety;
every morning he opened his side window as soon as he got up, looking past the trees for signs of
destruction; in the fields he worried about it. But the house always stood: the variegated roof, the
frames, the crapaud pillars, the wooden staircase.
When Shama came he told her of his fears.
She said, “I don’t think they would worry about it.”
And he regretted telling her, for when Seth came he said, “So you frighten they burn it down,
eh? Don’t worry. They not so idle.”
Mr. Maclean came twice and went away.
And every day the rain fell, the sun blazed, the house became greyer, the sawdust, once fresh
and aromatic, became part of the earth, the asphalt snakes hanging from the roof grew longer, and
many more died, and Mr. Biswas worked more and more elaborate messages of comfort for his
walls with a steady, unthinking hand, and a mind in turmoil.
Then one evening a great calm settled on him, and he made a decision. He had for too long
regarded situations as temporary; henceforth he would look upon every stretch of time, however
short, as precious. Time would never be dismissed again. No action would merely lead to another;
every action was a part of his life which could not be recalled; therefore thought had to be given to
every action: the opening of a matchbox, the striking of a match. Slowly, then, as though unused to
his limbs, and concentrating hard, he had his evening bath, cooked his meal, ate it, washed up, and
settled down in his rockingchair to pass–no, to use, to enjoy, to live–the evening. The house was
unimportant. The evening, in this room, was all that mattered.
And so great was his assurance that he did something he had not done for weeks. He took
down the Reader’s Library edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame . He passed his hands over the
cover; deliberately he opened the book, broke the spine in a few places, destroying it completely in
one place, and, pulling up his legs on to the chair so that he was huddled and cosy, and smacking
his lips, which was not one of his habits, he began to read.
His mind was clear. He had pushed everything apart from the Victor Hugo to the boundaries.
He had made a clearing in the bush: that was the picture he gave himself of his mind: for his mind
had become quite separate from the rest of himself.
The image changed. It was no longer a forest, but a billowing black cloud. Unless he was
careful the cloud would funnel into his head. He felt it pressing on his head. He didn’t want to look
up.
Surely it was only a trick of the oil lamp, which stood directly in front of him on the table?
He huddled a little more on the chair and smacked his lips again.
Then he was so afraid that he almost cried out.
Why should he be afraid? Of whom? Esmeralda? Quasimodo? The goat? The crowd?
People. He could hear them next door and all down the barracks. No road was without them,
no house. They were in the newspapers on the wall, in the photographs, in the simple drawings in
advertisements. They were in the book he was holding. They were in all books. He tried to think of
landscapes without people: sand and sand and sand, without the “oses” Lai had spoken about; vast
white plateaux, with himself safely alone, a speck in the centre.
Was he afraid of real people?
He must experiment. But why? He had spent all his life among people without even thinking
that he might be afraid of them. He had faced people across a rumshop counter; he had gone to
school; he had walked down crowded main roads on market day.
Why now? Why so suddenly?
His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage.
His fingers were dusted with gilt from the pall-like cover of the book. As he studied them the
clearing became overgrown again and the black cloud billowed in. How heavy! How dark!
He put his feet down and sat still, staring at the lamp, seeing nothing. The darkness filled his
head. All his life had been good until now. And he had never known. He had spoiled it all by worry
and fear. About a rotting house, the threats of illiterate labourers.
Now he would never more be able to go among people.
He surrendered to the darkness.
When he roused himself he opened the top half of the door. He saw no one. The barracks had
gone to sleep. He would have to wait until morning to find out whether he was really afraid.
In the morning he had a full minute of lucidity. He remembered that something had nagged
and exhausted him the previous evening. Then, still in bed, he remembered, and the anguish
returned. He got up. The bedsheet looked tormented. The mattress was exposed in places and he
could smell the dingy old coconut-fibre. Slowly and carefully, like his actions the night before, his
thoughts came, and he framed each thought in a complete sentence. He thought: “The bed is a mess.
Therefore I slept badly. I must have been afraid all through the night. Therefore the fear is still with
me.”
Outside, beyond the closed window, the light breaking through the chinks and fanning out in
dust-shot rays, was the world. Outside there were people.
He spoke aloud some of the words of comfort that hung on the walls. Then, trying to feel
them as deeply as he could, he closed his eyes and spoke them again slowly, syllable by syllable.
Then he pretended to write the words on his head with his finger.
Then he prayed.
But even in prayer he found images of people, and his prayers were perverted.
He dressed and opened the top half of the door.
Tarzan was waiting.
“You are glad to see me,” he thought. “You are an animal and think that because I have a
head and hands and look as I did yesterday I am a man. I am deceiving you. I am not whole.”
Tarzan wagged his tail.
He opened the lower half of the door.
People!
Fear seized him and hurt like a pain.
Tarzan jumped upon him, egg-stained, shining-eyed.
Grieving, he stroked him. “I enjoyed this yesterday and the day before. I was whole then.”
Already yesterday, last night, was as remote as childhood. And mixed with his fear was this
grief for a happy life never enjoyed and now lost.
He set about doing the things he did every morning. At the beginning of every action he
forgot his pain: split seconds of freedom, relished only after they had gone. Breaking the hibiscus
twig, for instance, as he did every morning, to brush his teeth with one of the crushed ends, he
automatically looked past the trees to see whether his house had been destroyed during the night.
Then he remembered how unimportant the house had become.
Bravely, exposing himself to menace, he stripped to bath at the waterbarrel.
The labourers were up. He heard the morning sounds: the hawking, spitting, the fanning of
coal-pots, the hissing of fryingpans, the fresh, brisk morning talk. Negligible, nondescript people
yesterday, each now had to be considered individually.
He looked at them and checked.
Fear.
The sun was coming up, lighting the dew on the grass, the roof, the trees: a cool sun, a
pleasant time of day.
As with actions, so with people. Meeting them, he began to speak as though it was yesterday.
Then the questioning came, and the inevitable answer: another relationship spoiled, another piece of
the present destroyed.
The day which had begun, for that minute while he was still in bed, as a normal, happy day,
was ending with him in an exhausting frenzy of questioning. He looked, he questioned, he was
afraid. Then he questioned again. The process was taking a fraction of a second.
By the afternoon, however, he had made some progress. He was not afraid of children. They
filled him only with grief. So much that was good and beautiful, from which he was now forever
barred, awaited them.
He went to his room, lay down on the bed and forced himself to cry for all his lost happiness.
There was nothing he could do. The questioning went on ceaselessly. One photograph after
another, one drawing after another, one story after another. He tried not to look at the newspapers
on the wall, but always he had to check, always he was afraid, and then always he became uncertain
again.
In the end the futility of lying on the bed caused him to rise and make another of those
decisions he had been making all day: decisions to ignore, to behave normally, little decisions, little
gestures of defiance that were soon forgotten.
He decided to cycle to Hanuman House.
Every man and woman he saw, even at a distance, gave him a twist of panic. But he had
already grown used to that; it had become part of the pain of living. Then, as he cycled, he
discovered a new depth to this pain. Every object he had not seen for twenty-four hours was part of
his whole and happy past. Everything he now saw became sullied by his fear, every field, every
house, every tree, every turn in the road, every bump and subsidence. So that, by merely looking at
the world, he was progressively destroying his present and his past.
And there were some things he wanted to leave untouched. It was bad enough to deceive
Tarzan. He didn’t want to deceive Anand and Savi. He turned and cycled back, past the fields
whose terror was already familiar, to Green Vale.
It occurred to him that by repeating as far as he could all his actions of the previous night he
might somehow exorcize the thing that had fallen on him. So, with a deliberation that was like the
deliberation of the day before, he bathed, cooked, ate, then sat down and opened Notre Dame .
But the reading only brought back the memory of the previous night, the discovery of fear,
and left his hands dusted with gilt.
Every morning the period of lucidity lessened. The bed-sheet, examined every morning,
always testified to a tormented night. Between the beginning of a routine action and the questioning
the time of calm grew less. Between the meeting of a familiar person and the questioning there was
less and less of ease. Until there was no lucidity at all, and all action was irrelevant and futile.
But it was always better to be out among real people than to be in his room with the
newspapers and his imaginings. And though he continued to solace himself with visions of deserted
landscapes of sand and snow, his anguish became especially acute on Sunday afternoons, when
fields and roads were empty and everything was still.
Continually he looked for some sign that the corruption which had come without warning
upon him had secretly gone away again. Examining the bedsheet was one thing. Looking at his
fingernails was the other. They were invariably bitten down; but sometimes he saw a thin white rim
on one nail, and though these rims never lasted, he took their appearance to mean that release was
near.
Then, biting his nails one evening, he broke off a piece of a tooth. He took the piece out of his
mouth and placed it on his palm. It was yellow and quite dead, quite unimportant: he could hardly
recognize it as part of a tooth: if it were dropped on the ground it would never be found: a part of
himself that would never grow again. He thought he would keep it. Then he walked to the window
and threw it out.
One Saturday Seth said, while they were by the unfinished house, “What’s the matter,
Mohun? You are the colour of this.” He placed his large hand on one of the grey uprights.
And Mr. Maclean called. Someone he knew had offered him some timber at a bargain price. It
would be enough to wall one room.
They went to look at the house. Mr. Maclean saw the asphalt hanging from the roof but said
nothing about it. The floorboards in the back bedroom had begun to shrink, cracking and
cambering. Mr. Maclean said, “The man did say that the wood was cured. But cedar is a damn
funny wood. It does never cure at all.”
The new timber was bought. It was cedar.
“No tongue-and-groove,” Mr. Maclean said.
Mr. Biswas said nothing.
Mr. Maclean understood. He had seen this apathy overcome the builders of houses again and
again.
The back bedroom was walled. The door to the partially floored drawingroom was built and
hung. The door to the non-existent front bedroom was built and nailed into the doorway: “To
prevent accident,” Mr. Maclean said, “in case you want to move in right away.” Mr. Biswas had
wanted doors with panels; he got planks of cedar nailed to two cross bars. The window was built in
the same fashion and hung; the new black bolts gleamed on the new wood.
“It coming along nice,” Mr. Maclean said.
Into Mr. Biswas’s busy, exhausted mind came the thought: “Hari blessed it. Shama made him
bless it. They gave the galvanized iron and they blessed it.”
His sleep was broken by dreams. He was in the Tulsi Store. There were crowds everywhere.
Two thick black threads were chasing him. As he cycled to Green Vale the threads lengthened. One
thread turned pure white; the black thread became thicker and thicker, purple-black and
monstrously long. It was a rubbery black snake; it developed a comic face; it found the chase funny
and said so to the white thread, now also a snake.
When he passed the house and saw the black snakes hanging from the roof, he touched a
crapaud pillar and said, “Hari blessed it.” He remembered the suitcase, the whining prayers, the
sprinkling with the mango leaf, the dropping of the penny. “Hari blessed it.”
He was on a hill, a bare, brown-green hill. It was hot but the wind was cool and blew his hair.
A woman was at the foot of the hill. She was crying and coming to him for help. He felt her pain
but didn’t want to be seen. What help could he give? And the woman–Shama, Anand, Savi, his
mother–kept coming up the hill. He heard her sobs and wanted to cry to her to go away.
Tarzan was whining outside his door.
One of his paws had been damaged.
“You like eggs too much.”
Then he remembered the dispossessed labourers.
Some nights later he was awakened by barking and shouts.
“Driver! Driver!”
He opened the top half of the door.
“They set fire to Dookinan land,” the watchman said.
He put on his clothes and hurried to the spot, followed by excited labourers.
There was no great danger or damage. Dookinan’s plot was small and was separated from the
other fields by a trace and a ditch. Mr. Biswas ordered the boundary canes of the adjoining fields to
be cut, and the labourers, though disappointed at the blaze, which from a distance had promised
much, worked with zest. The firelight lit up their bodies and kept away the chill.
The tall red and yellow flames shrank; the trash smouldered, red and black, crackled and
collapsed, uncovering the red heart of the fire, quickly cooling to black and grey. Glowing scraps
rose, twinkling redly, blackened and diminished. At the roots the canes glowed like charcoal; in
places it was as if the earth itself had caught fire. The labourers beat the roots and the trash with
sticks; ash floated up; smoke turned from grey to white, and thinned.
Only then, when the danger had disappeared, Mr. Biswas realized that for more than an hour
he had not questioned himself.
Instantly the questionings, the fear, came.
When the labourers returned to the barracks their chatter lasted a short time, and he was left
alone.
But the hour had proved one thing. He was going to get better soon.
It was the first of many disappointments. In time he came to disregard these periods of
freedom, just as he no longer expected to wake up one morning and find himself whole again.
At the beginning of the Christmas school holidays, when the sugarcane was in arrow once
more and the Christmas shop-signs were going up at Arwacas, Shama sent word by Seth that she
was bringing the children to Green Vale for a few days.
Mr. Biswas waited for them with dread. On the day they were to arrive he began to wish for
some accident that would prevent their coming. But he knew there would be no accident. If
anything was to happen he had to act. He decided that he had to get rid of Anand and Savi and
himself, in such a way that the children would never know who had killed them. All morning he
was possessed of visions in which he cutlassed, poisoned, strangled, burned, Anand and Savi; so
that even before they came his relationship with them had been perverted. About Myna and Shama
he didn’t care; he didn’t want to kill them.
They came. At once his designs became insubstantial and absurd. He felt only resignation and
a great fatigue. And the deception and especial pain he had wished to avoid began. Even while he
allowed himself to be touched and kissed by Anand and Savi he was questioning himself about
them, looking for the fear, and wondering whether they had seen the deception and could tell what
was going on in his mind.
Of Shama he was not afraid; only envious, for her unthinking assurance. Then almost
immediately he began to hate her. Her pregnancy was grotesque; he hated the way she sat down;
when she ate he listened for the noises she made; he hated the way she fussed and clucked over the
children; he hated it when she puffed and fanned and sweated in her pregnant way; he was
nauseated by the frills and embroidery and other ornamentation on her clothes.
Shama, Savi and Myna slept on bedding on the floor. Anand slept with Mr. Biswas on the
fourposter. Dreading the boy’s touch, Mr. Biswas built a bank of pillows between Anand and
himself.
His fatigue deepened. The next day, Sunday, he scarcely got out of bed. Whereas before he
felt he had to be out of the room, now he didn’t wish to leave it. He said he was sick and found it
easy to simulate the symptoms of malaria.
When Seth came Mr. Biswas told him, “Is ague, I think.”
After a week his fatigue hadn’t left him. Sitting up in bed he made kites and toy-carts for
Anand and built a chest-of-drawers with matchboxes for Savi. The longer he stayed in the room the
less he wanted to leave it. He became constipated. Yet from time to time he had to go outside; then
he came back hurriedly, anxiously, relaxing only when he was on the bed again.
He continued to observe Shama closely, with suspicion, hatred and nausea. He never spoke to
her directly, but through one of the children; and it was some time before Shama realized this.
As he was lying in bed one morning she came and placed her palm, then the back of her hand,
on his forehead. The action offended him, flattered him, and made him uneasy. She had been
cutting vegetables and he couldn’t bear their smell on her hand.
“No fever,” she said.
She undid his shirt and put her hand, large and dark and foreign, on his pale, soft chest.
He wanted to scream.
He said, “No, I not fat enough yet. You got to put me back and feed me some more. Here,
why don’t you just feel my finger?”
She took her hand away. “Something on your mind, man?”
“Something on your mind?” he mimicked. “Something in my mind and you know what it is.”
He was violently angry; never before had he been so disgusted by her. Yet he wished her to remain
there. Half hoping she would take him seriously, half hoping only to amuse and bewilder her, he
said in his quick, high-pitched voice, “Something in my mind all right. Clouds. Lots of little black
clouds.”
“What you say?”
“Is a funny thing. You ever notice that when you insult people or tell them the truth they
always pretend not to hear you the first time?”
“Is my own fault for meddling in what is not my business. I don’t know why I come here for.
If it wasn’t for the children–”
“So all-you send Hari with his little black box, eh? All-you must think I look like a real fool.”
“Black box?”
“You see what I mean? You didn’t hear the first time.”
“Look, I just don’t have the time to stand up here talking to you like this, you hear. I wish you
had a real fever. That would stop your mouth.”
He was beginning to enjoy the argument. “I know you want me to get a real fever. I know
all-you want to see me dead. And then see the old she-fox crying, the little gods laughing, you
crying–dressed up like hell to boot. Nice, eh? I know that is what all-you want.”
“Dress-up and powder-up? Me? On what you give me?”
Abruptly Mr. Biswas went cold with fear.
Seth and the land and the corrugated iron; Hari and the black box; the blessing; and now,
since Shama had come, this fatigue.
He was dying.
They were killing him. He would just remain in this room and die.
She was in the kitchen area, cooing to the baby in the hammock.
“Get out!”
Shama looked up.
He jumped out of bed and grabbed the walking-stick. He was cold all over. His heart beat fast
and painfully.
Shama climbed up the step to the room.
“Get out! Don’t come inside. Don’t touch me!”
Myna was crying.
“Man,” Shama said.
“Don’t come into this room. Don’t set foot in it again.” He waved the stick. He moved to the
window and, looking at her, waving the stick, began to draw the bolt. “Don’t touch me,” he bawled,
and there were sobs mixed with his words.
She blocked the door.
But he had thought of the window. He pushed it open. It swung out shakily. Light came into
the room and fresh air mingled with the musty smell of old boards and newspapers–he had forgotten
how musty they smelled. Beyond the flat barrackyard he saw the trees diat lined the road and
screened his house.
Shama walked towards him.
He began screaming and crying. He pressed his palms on the window-sill and tried to hoist
himself up, looking back at her, the stick now useless as a weapon of defence since his hands were
occupied.
“What are you doing?” she said in Hindi. “Look, you will damage yourself.”
He was aware of Tarzan, Savi and Anand below the window. Tarzan was wagging his tail,
barking and leaping up against the wall.
Shama came closer.
He was on the sill.
“O God!” he cried, winding his head up and down. “Go away.”
She was near enough to touch him.
He kicked at her.
She gave a yelp of pain.
He saw, too late, that he had kicked her on the belly.
The women from the barracks rushed up when they heard Shama cry out, and helped her from
the room.
Savi and Anand came round to the kitchen area in front. Tarzan ran in puzzlement between
them and the women and Mr. Biswas.
“Pack up your clothes and go home,” Dookhnee, one of the barrack-women, said. She had
often been beaten and had witnessed many wife-beatings; they made all women sisters.
Savi went into the room fearfully and, not looking at her father, started to pack clothes into a
suitcase.
Mr. Biswas stared and shouted, “Take your children and go away. Go away!”
Sharna, surrounded by the barrack-women, called, “Anand, pack up your clothes quick.”
Mr. Biswas jumped down from the sill.
“No !” he said. “Anand is not going with you. Take your girl children and go.” He didn’t
know why he had said that. Savi was the only child he knew, yet he had gone out of his way to hurt
her; and he didn’t know whether he wanted Anand to stay. Perhaps he had spoken only because
Shama had mentioned the name.
“Anand,” Shama said, “Go and pack your clothes.”
Dookhnee said, “Yes, go and pack your clothes.”
And many of the women said, “Go, boy.”
“He is not going with you to that house,” Mr. Biswas said.
Anand remained where he was, in the kitchen area, stroking Tarzan, not looking at Mr.
Biswas or the women.
Savi came out of the room with a suitcase and a pair of shoes. She dusted her feet and buckled
on a shoe.
Shama, only now beginning to cry, said in Hindi, “Savi, I have told you many times to wash
your feet before putting on your shoes.”
“All right, Ma. I will go and wash them.”
“Don’t bother this time,” Dookhnee said.
The women said, “No, don’t bother.”
Savi buckled on the other shoe.
Shama said, “Anand, do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay with your father?”
Mr. Biswas, the stick in his hand, looked at Anand.
Anand continued to stroke Tarzan, whose head was now upturned, his eyes partly closed.
Mr. Biswas ran to the green table and awkwardly pulled out the drawer. He took the long box
of crayons he used for his placards and held it to Anand. He shook the box; the crayons rattled.
Savi said, “Come, Anand boy. Go and get your clothes.”
Still stroking Tarzan, Anand said, “I staying with Pa.” His voice was low and irritable.
“Anand!” Savi said.
“Don’t beg him,” Shama said, in control of herself again. “He is a man and knows what he is
doing.”
“Boy,” Dookhnee said. “Your mother.”
Anand said nothing.
Shama got up and the circle of women around her widened. She took Myna, Savi took the
suitcase, and they walked along the path, muddy between sparse and stubborn grass, to the road,
scattering the hens and chickens before them. Tarzan followed, and was diverted by the chickens.
When he was pecked by an angry hen he looked for Shama and Savi and Myna. They had
disappeared. He trotted back to the barracks and Anand.
Mr. Biswas opened the box and showed Anand the sharpened crayons. “Take them. They are
yours. You can do what you like with them.”
Anand shook his head.
“You don’t want them?”
Tarzan, between Anand’s legs, held up his head to be stroked, closing his eyes in anticipation.
“What do you want then?”
Anand shook his head. Tarzan shook his.
“Why did you stay then?”
Anand looked exasperated.
“Why?”
“Because–” The word came out thin, explosive, charged with anger, at himself and his father.
“Because they was going to leave you alone.”
For the rest of that day they hardly spoke.
His instinct had been right. As soon as Shama had gone his fatigue left him. He became
restless again, and almost welcomed the familiar constricted turmoil in his mind. He returned to the
fields, taking Anand with him on the first day. Anand, dusty, itching, scorched by the sun and cut
by sharp grass, refused to go again, and thereafter remained at the barracks with Tarzan.
He made more toys for Anand. A round tin-lid loosely nailed to a rod provided something that
rolled when pushed and gave Anand a deep satisfaction. At night they drew imaginary scenes:
snow-covered mountains and fir trees, red-hulled yachts in a blue sea below a clear sky, roads
winding between well-kept forests to green mountains in the distance. They also talked.
“Who is your father?”
“You.”
“Wrong. I am not your father. God is your father.”
“Oh. And what about you?”
“I am just somebody. Nobody at all. I am just a man you know.”
He showed Anand how to mix colours. He taught him that red and yellow made orange, blue
and yellow green.
“Oh. That is why the leaves turn yellow?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, look then. Suppose I take a leaf and wash it and wash it and wash it, it will turn yellow
or blue?”
“Not really. The leaf is God’s work. You see?”
“No.”
“Your trouble is that you don’t really believe. There was a man like you one time. He wanted
to mock a man like me. So one day, when the man like me was sleeping, this other man drop an
orange in his lap, thinking, ‘I bet the damn fool going to wake up and say that God drop the
orange.’ So the other man woke up and began eating the orange. And this man come up and say, ‘I
suppose God give you that orange.’ ‘Yes,’ the other man said. ‘Well, let me tell you. Is not God. Is
me.’ ‘Well,’ the other man said, ‘I prayed for an orange while I was asleep.’ “
Anand was impressed.
“Now, look,” Mr. Biswas said. “See this matchbox. You see me holding it in my hand. Oops!
It fall down. Why?”
“You leggo, that’s why.”
“Not that at all. It fall down because of gravity. The law of gravity. They not teaching you
children anything at all these days.”
He talked to Anand about people called Coppernickus and Galilyo. And it gave him a thrill to
be the first to inform Anand that the world was round and moved about the sun.
“Remember Galilyo. Always stick up for yourself.”
He was glad that Anand was interested. It was the week before Christmas and he was fearing
the result of Seth’s visit.
He told Anand, “On Saturday we are going to make a compass.”
And on Saturday Seth said, “Why you don’t come home, Anand boy? Come home and hang
up your stocking. What you doing here with your father?”
“He is not my father. It just look to you that he is my father.”
Seth evaded the theological issue. “They going to make cake and icecream, boy.”
Mr. Biswas said, “Remember Galilyo.”
Anand stayed.
Using the batteries of his electric torch Mr. Biswas magnetized a needle and stuck it on a disc
of paper; in the centre of the disc he inserted a cap of paper and rested the cap on the head of a pin.
“Where the eye of the needle points, that is north.”
They played with that until the needle lost its magnetism.
Sometimes Mr. Biswas said he had ague. Then, wrapped up tightly and shivering, he made
Anand recite Hindi hymns after him. And at these times, though nothing was said, Anand became
affected by his father’s fear and repeated the hymns like charms. The barrackroom, its door and
window closed, its edges in darkness, became cavernous and full of menace, and Anand longed for
morning.
But there were compensations.
“Today,” Mr. Biswas said, “I am going to show you something about a thing called
centrifugal force. Go and get the bucket outside and full it up so high with water.”
Anand brought the water.
“Not enough space here really,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Why you don’t go outside?”
Mr. Biswas didn’t listen. “Got to give it a good swing.” He swung.
The water splashed on the bed, the walls, the floor.
“The bucket was too heavy. Go and get one of the small blue pots from the kitchen. Full that
with some water.”
And the second time it worked.
They made an electric buzzer, using the torch batteries, a piece of tin and a nail, a rusty new
nail, one of those Mr. Maclean had brought in newspaper on the afternoon Edgar had brushed the
site for the house.
There were many reasons why Mr. Biswas moved from the barracks to the finished room of
his house. It was a positive action; it was a confident, defiant gesture; there was his continuing
unease at hearing people moving about the barracks. And there was his hope that living in a new
house in the new year might bring about a new state of mind. He would not have moved if he had
been alone, for he feared solitude more than people. But, with Anand, he had enough company.
Tarzan found a pregnant cat in possession of the empty, dusty room and chased her out.
The room was swept and cleaned. They tried to scrape the asphalt snakes off the floor; but the
asphalt, which melted so easily on the corrugated iron, remained hard on the cedar boards. The
room was smaller than the barrackroom; the bed, Shama’s dressingtable, the green table, the kitchen
safe and the rockingchair nearly filled it. “Got to be careful now,” Mr. Biswas said. “Can’t rock too
hard.” And there were other inconveniences. There was no kitchen; they had to cook on boxes
downstairs, below the room; they both got nausea. The roof had no gutters and water had to be
fetched all the way from the barrack barrels. They also had to use the barrack latrine.
And every day Mr. Biswas saw the snakes, thin, black, lengthening.
The incompleteness of the house didn’t depress him. He saw the rafters, the old corrugated
iron, the grey uprights, the cracked boards on the floor and walls, the door to the nonexistent
bedroom nailed and barred. He knew that they had made him unhappy; but that was at a time so
remote he could now scarcely imagine it.
The snakes appeared more often in his dreams. He began to regard them as living, and
wondered what it would be like to have one fall and curl on his skin.
The questioning and the fear remained. He hadn’t left that at the barracks.
The trees could conceal so much.
And one night Anand was awakened by Mr. Biswas jumping out of bed, screaming, tearing at
his vest as though he had been attacked by a column of red ants.
A snake had fallen on him. Very thin, and not long.
When they looked up they saw the parent snake, waiting to release some more.
With poles and brooms they tried to pull down the snakes. The asphalt only swung when they
hit it. To grab at it was only to pull away a small snake, leaving the pregnant parent above.
He got a cocoa-knife and spent the following evening cutting down the snakes. It was not
easy. Below the crust at the roots the asphalt was soft but rubbery. He scraped hard and felt the rust
from the roof falling on his face.
By the next afternoon the snakes had begun to grow again.
He said he had another touch of malaria. He wrapped himself in the floursack sheet and
rocked in his chair. Tarzan had his tail crushed; he leapt up with a yell, and went out of the room.
“Say Rama Rama Sita Rama , and nothing will happen to you,” Mr. Biswas said.
Anand repeated the words, faster and faster.
“You don’t want to leave me?”
Anand didn’t reply.
This had become one of Mr. Biswas’s fears. By concentrating on it–a power he had in his
state–he managed to make it the most oppressive of all his fears: that Anand would leave him and
he would be left alone.
Anand was rolling his tin-lid about the yard one afternoon when two men came to the house
and asked whether he lived there. Then they asked for the driver.
“He in the fields,” Anand said. “But he coming back just now.”
Between the trees the road was cool. The men squatted there. They hummed; they talked; they
threw pebbles; they chewed blades of grass; they spat. Anand watched them.
One of the men called, “Boy, come here.” He was fat and yellow-skinned with a black
moustache and light eyes.
The other man, who was younger, said, “We digging for treasure.”
Anand couldn’t resist that. Pushing his tin-lid, he went to the road.
“Come on. Dig,” the younger man said.
The fat man cried, “Yaah!” and pulled out a cent from the gravel.
Anand went to where the fat man was and began scraping
Then the younger man called out, “Aha!” and took up a penny from the gravel.
Anand ran to him. Then the fat man called out again; he had found another cent.
Anand moved back and forth between the men.
“But I not finding any,” he said.
“Here,” the younger man said. “Dig here.”
Anand dug and found a penny. “I could keep it?”
“But is yours,” the younger man said. “You find it.”
The game went on for some time. Anand found two more cents.
Then the fat man appeared to lose interest. The driver taking long,” he said. “Where your
father, boy?”
Anand pointed to the sky and was pleased when the fat man looked puzzled and asked, “The
driver is your father, not so?”
“Well, everybody think he is my father. But he is not my father really. He is just a man I
know.”
The men looked at one another. The fat man took up a handful of gravel and made as if to
throw it at Anand. “Run away,” he said. “Go on, haul your little tail.”
“Is not your road,” Anand said. “Is the PWD road.”
“So you is a smart man into the bargain? Who the hell you think you talking to?” The fat man
rose. “Since you so smart, give me back my money.”
“Find your own. This is mine.” Anand turned to the younger man. “You see me find it.”
“Leave the boy,” the younger man said.
“I not going to take cheek from a little boy who rob me of my last few cents,” the fat man
said. “I going to teach him a lesson.” He seized Anand.
“Hit me and I tell my father.”
The fat man hesitated.
“Leave him, Dinnoo,” the younger man said. “Look, the driver.”
Anand broke away and ran to Mr. Biswas. “That fat man was trying to thief my money.”
“Afternoon, boss,” the fat man said.
“Haul your tail. Who the hell tell you you could lay your hand on my son?”
“Son, boss?”
“He try to thief my money,” Anand said.
“Was a game,” the fat man said.
“Haul off!” Mr. Biswas said. “Job! You not looking for any job. You not getting any either.”
“But, boss,” the younger man said, “Mr. Seth say he did tell you.”
“Didn’t tell me nothing.”
“But Mr. Seth say–” the fat man said.
“Leave them, Dinnoo,” the younger man said. “Father and blasted son.”
“Is in the blood,” the fat man said.
“You mind your mouth,” Mr. Biswas shouted.
“Tcha!” The man sucked his teeth, backing away.
Anand showed Mr. Biswas the coppers he had found.
“The road full of money,” he said. “They was finding silver. But I didn’t find any.”
Mr. Biswas was awake and lying in bed when Anand got up. Anand always got up first. Mr.
Biswas heard him walk along the resounding boards of the unfinished drawingroom floor and step
on to the staircase–that was a firmer sound. Then there was a silence, and he heard Anand coming
back across the drawingroom.
Anand stood in the doorway. His face was blank. “Pa.” His voice was weak. His mouth
remained half open and quivering.
Mr. Biswas threw off the sheet and went to him.
Anand shrugged off his father’s hand and pointed across the drawingroom.
Mr. Biswas went to look.
On the lowest step he saw Tarzan, dead. The body had been flung down carelessly. The hind
quarters were on the step, the muzzle on the ground. The brown and white hair was clotted with
black-red blood and stained with dirt; flies were thick about him. The tail was propped up against
the second step, erect, the hair ruffled in the light morning breeze, as though it belonged to a living
dog. The neck had been cut, the belly ripped open; flies were on his lips and around his eyes, which
were mercifully closed.
Mr. Biswas felt Anand standing beside him.
“Come. Go inside. I will look after Tarzan.”
He led Anand to the bedroom. Anand walked lightly, very lightly, as though responding only
to the pressure of Mr. Biswas’s fingers. Mr. Biswas passed his hand over Anand’s hair. Anand
angrily shook the hand away. The tight, brittle body quivered and Anand, clutching his shirt with
both hands, began dancing on the floor.
It was some seconds before Mr. Biswas realized that Anand had drawn a deep breath before
screaming. He could do nothing but wait, watching the swollen face, the distended mouth, the
narrow eyes. And then it came, a terrible whistle of a shriek that went on and on until it broke up
into gurgles and strangulated sounds.
“I don’t want to stay here! I want to go!”
“All right,” Mr. Biswas said, when Anand sat red-eyed and snuffling on the bed. “I will take
you to Hanuman House. Tomorrow.” It was a plea for time. In the anxiety that palpitated through
him he had forgotten the dog, and knew only that he didn’t want to be left alone. It was a skill he
had acquired: to forget the immediately unpleasant. Nothing could distract him from the deeper
pain.
Anand, too, forgot the dog. All he recognized was the plea and his own power. He beat his
legs against the side of the rumpled bed and stamped on the floor. “No! No! I want to go today.”
“All right. I will take you this afternoon.”
Mr. Biswas buried Tarzan in the yard, adding another mound to those thrown up by the
energetic Edgar and now covered with a skin of vegetation. Tarzan’s mound looked raw; but soon
the weeds would cover it; like Edgar’s mounds it would become part of the shape of the land.
The early morning breeze dropped. It became hazy. The heat rose steadily and no relieving
shower came in the early afternoon. Then the haze thickened, clouds turned from white to silver to
grey to black and billowed heavily across the sky: a watercolour in black and grey.
It became dark.
Mr. Biswas hurried from the fields and said, “I don’t think we can take you to Arwacas today.
The rain is going to come any minute.”
Anand was content. Darkness at four o”clock was an event, romantic, to be remembered.
Downstairs, in the makeshift kitchen of boxes, they prepared a meal. Then they went upstairs
to wait for the downpour.
Soon it came. Isolated drops, rapping hard on the roof, like a slow roll of drums. The wind
freshened, the rain slanted. Every drop that struck the uprights blotted, expanding, into the shape of
a spear-head. The rain that struck the dust below the roof rolled itself into dark pellets of dirt, neat
and spherical.
They lit the oil lamp. Moths flew to it. Flies, deceived by the darkness, had already settled
down for the night; they were thick on the asphalt lengths.
Mr. Biswas said, “If you go to Hanuman House, you have to give me back the
colour-pencils.”
The wind blew in gusts, curving the fall of the rain.
“But you did give them to me.”
“Ah. But you didn’t take them. Remember? Anyway, I taking them back now.”
“Well, you could take them back. I don’t want them.”
“All right, all right. I was only joking. I not taking them back.”
“I don’t want them.”
“Take them.”
“No.”
Anand went out to the unfinished drawingroom.
When the real rain came it announced itself seconds in advance by its roar: the roar of wind,
of wind through trees, of the deluge on distant trees. Then came a swift crepitation on the roof,
instantly lost in a continuous and even hammering, so loud that if Mr. Biswas spoke Anand could
not have heard.
Here and there Mr. Maclean’s roof leaked; that added to the cosiness of shelter. Water fell
from the corrugations in evenly-spaced streams, enclosing the house. Water flowed down the
sloping land below the roof; the pellets of dirt had long disappeared. Water gouged out tortuous
channels as it forced its way down to the road and down to the hollow before the barracks. And the
rain continued to roar, and the roof resounded.
For several seconds at a time lightning lit up a shining chaotic world. Fresh mud flowed off
Tarzan’s grave in a thin regular stream. Raindrops glittered as they struck the sodden ground. Then
the thunder came, grating and close. Anand thought of a monstrous steam-roller breaking through
the sky. The lightning was exciting but it made him feel peculiar. That, and the thunder, sent him
back to the bedroom.
He surprised Mr. Biswas writing with his finger on his head. Mr. Biswas quickly pretended
that he was playing with his hair. The flame of the oil lamp, though protected by a glass chimney,
wavered; shadows dodged about the room; the shadows of the snakes swung in an ever-changing
pattern on the shivering roof.
Still officially annoyed with his father, Anand sat down on the floor, at the foot of the bed,
and held his arms over his knees. The din on the roof and the beat of the rain on the trees and earth
made him feel chilly. Something fell near him. It was a winged ant, its wings collapsed and now a
burden on its wormlike body. These creatures came out only in heavy rain and seldom lived beyond
it. When they fell they never rose again. Anand pressed a finger on the broken wing. The ant
wriggled, the wing was released; and the ant, suddenly busy, suddenly deceptively whole, moved
off towards the dark.
All at once a cycle of heavy rain was over. It still drizzled, and the wind still blew, flinging
the drizzle on the roof and walls like showers of sand. It was possible to hear the water from the
roof falling to the earth, water gurgling as it ran off in its new channels. The rain had soaked
through the gaps between the wall-boards. The edges of the floor were wet.
“Rama Rama Sita Rama , Rama Rama Sita Rama .”
Mr. Biswas was lolling on the bed, his legs locked together, his lips moving rapidly. The
expression on his face was one of exasperation rather than pain.
Anand thought this was a plea for sympathy and ignored it. He leaned his head on his arms
crossed over his knees, and rocked on the floor.
A fresh cycle of rain started. A winged ant dropped on Anand’s arm. Hurriedly he brushed it
off; where the ant touched him seemed to burn. Then he saw that the room was full of these ants
enjoying the last minutes of their short life. Their small wings, strained by large bodies, quickly
became useless, and without wings they were without defence. They kept on dropping. Their
enemies had already discovered them. On one wall, in the shadow of the reflector of the oil lamp,
Anand saw a column of black ants. They were not the crazy ants, thin frivolous creatures who
scattered at the slightest disturbance; they were the biting ants, smaller, thicker, neater, purple-black
with a dull shine, moving slowly and in strict formation, as solemn and stately as undertakers.
Lightning lit up the room again and Anand saw the column of biting ants stretched diagonally
across two walls: a roundabout route, but they had their reasons.
“Hear them!”
Anand, watching the ants, his mouth pressed on his goose-fleshed arm, didn’t reply.
“Boy!”
The anguish, the loudness of the voice rising above rain and wind made Anand jump. He
stood up.
“You hear them?”
Anand listened, trying to pick up the component parts of the din: the rain, the wind, the
running of water, the trees, the rain on walls and roof. Talk, indistinct, a bumble, rising and falling.
“You hear them?”
Anything could sound like talk: the gurgle of water, boughs rubbing against one another.
Anand opened the door a little way and looked down through the spars of the drawingroom. The
ground ran with shining black water. Below the unfloored front bedroom, where the ground was
higher and not so wet, two men were squatting before a smoking fire of twigs. Two large
heart-shaped leaves of the wild tannia were near the men. They must have used the leaves as
umbrellas when they had been caught by the heavier shower. The men stared at the fire. One man
was smoking a cigarette. In the weak firelight, in the stillness of the scene in the midst of turmoil,
this act of smoking, so intense and unruffled, might have been part of an ancient ritual.
“You see them?”
Anand closed the door.
On the floor the winged ants had a new life. They were possessed of scores of black limbs.
They were being carted away by the biting ants. They wriggled and squirmed, but did not disturb
the even solemnity of their bearers. Bodiless wings were also being carried away.
Lightning obliterated shadows and colour.
The hair on Anand’s arms and legs stood straight. His skin tingled.
“You see them?”
Anand thought they might be the men from the day before. But he couldn’t be sure.
“Bring the cutlass.”
Anand put the cutlass against the wall near the head of the bed. The wall was running with
water.
“And you take the walking-stick.”
Anand would have liked to go to sleep. But he didn’t want to get into bed with his father. And
with the floor full of ants where it was not wet, he couldn’t make up a bed for himself.
“Rama Rama Sita Rama , Rama Rama Sita Rama .”
“Rama Rama Sita Rama ,” Anand repeated.
Then Mr. Biswas forgot Anand and began to curse. He cursed Ajodha, Pundit Jairam, Mrs.
Tulsi, Shama, Seth.
“Say Rama Rama , boy.”
“Rama Rama Sita Rama .”
The rain abated.
When Anand looked outside, the men under the house had gone with their tannia leaves,
leaving a dead, hardly-smoking fire.
“You see them?”
The rain came again. Lightning flashed and flashed, thunder exploded and rolled.
The procession of the ants continued. Anand began killing them with the walking-stick.
Whenever he crushed a group carrying a living winged ant, the ants broke up, without confusion or
haste, re-formed, took away what they could of the crushed body and carried away their dead.
Anand struck and struck with his stick. A sharp pain ran up his arm. On his hand he saw an ant, its
body raised, its pincers buried in his skin. When he looked at the walking-stick he saw that it was
alive with biting ants crawling upwards. He was suddenly terrified of them, their anger, their
vindictiveness, their number. He threw the stick away from him. It fell into a puddle.
The roof rose and dropped, grinding and flapping. The house shook.
“Rama Rama Sita Rama ,” Anand said.
“O God! They coming!”
“They gone !” Anand shouted angrily.
Mr. Biswas muttered hymns in Hindi and English, left them unfinished, cursed, rolled on the
bed, his face still expressing only exasperation.
The flame of the oil lamp swayed, shrank, throwing the room into darkness for seconds, then
shone again.
A shaking on the roof, a groan, a prolonged grinding noise, and Anand knew that a sheet of
corrugated iron had been torn off. One sheet was left loose. It flapped and jangled continuously.
Anand waited for the fall of the sheet that had been blown off.
He never heard it.
Lightning; thunder; the rain on roof and walls; the loose iron sheet; the wind pushing against
the house, pausing, and pushing again.
Then there was a roar that overrode them all. When it struck the house the window burst open,
the lamp went instantly out, the rain lashed in, the lightning lit up the room and the world outside,
and when the lightning went out the room was part of the black void.
Anand began to scream.
He waited for his father to say something, to close the window, light the lamp.
But Mr. Biswas only muttered on the bed, and the rain and wind swept through the room with
unnecessary strength and forced open the door to the drawingroom, wall-less, floorless, of the house
Mr. Biswas had built.
Anand screamed and screamed.
Rain and wind smothered his voice, overturned the lamp, made the rockingchair rock and
skid, rattled the kitchen safe against the wall, destroyed all smell. Lightning, flashing intermittently,
steel-blue exploding into white, showed the ants continually disarrayed, continually re-forming.
Then Anand saw a light swaying in the dark. It was a man, bending forward against the rain, a
hurricane lamp in one hand, a cutlass in the other. The living flame was like a miracle.
It was Ramkhilawan from the barracks. He had a jutebag over his head and shoulders like a
cape. He was barefooted and his trousers were rolled up above his knees. The hurricane lamp
showed glinting streaks of rain, and, as he climbed the slippery steps, his footprints of mud,
instantly washed away.
“Oh, my poor little calf!” he called. “Oh, my poor little calf!”
He closed the drawingroom door. The lamp illuminated a wet chaos. He struggled with the
window. As soon as he had pulled it a little way from the wall to which it was pinned, the wind,
rising, gave a push, and the window slammed shut, making Ramkhilawan jump back. He took off
the dripping jutebag from his head and shoulders; his shirt stuck to his skin.
The oil lamp was not broken. There even remained some oil in it. The chimney was cracked,
but still whole. Ramkhilawan brought out a damp box of matches from his trouser pocket and put a
lighted match to the wick. The wick, waterlogged, spluttered; the match burned down; the wick
caught.
6. A Departure
A message had to be sent to Hanuman House. The labourers always responded to the
melodramatic and calamitous, and there were many volunteers. Through rain and wind and thunder
a messenger went that evening to Arwacas and dramatically unfolded his tale of calamity.
Mrs. Tulsi and the younger god were in Port of Spain. Shama was in the Rose Room; the
midwife had been attending upon her for two days.
Sisters and their husbands held a council.
“I did always think he was mad,” Chinta said.
Sushila, the childless widow, spoke with her sickroom authority. “It isn’t about Mohun I am
worried, but the children.”
Padma, Seth’s wife, asked, “What do you think he is sick with?”
Sumati the flogger said, “Message only said that he was very sick.”
“And that his house had been practically blown away,” Jai’s mother added.
There were some smiles.
“I am sorry to correct you, Sumati sister,” Chinta said. “But Message said that he wasn’t right
in his head.”
Seth said, “I suppose we have to bring the paddler home.”
The men got ready to go to Green Vale; they were as excited as the messenger.
The sisters bustled about, impressing and mystifying the children. Sushila, who occupied the
Blue Room when the god was away, cleared it of all personal, womanly things; much of her time
was devoted to keeping the mysteries of women from men. She also burned certain evil-smelling
herbs to purify and protect the house.
“Savi,” the children said, “something happen to your pappa.”
And they stuck pins in the wicks of lamps to keep misfortune and death away.
In the verandah and in every bedroom upstairs beds were made earlier than usual, lamps were
turned low, and the children fell asleep, lulled by the sound of the rain. Downstairs the sisters sat
silently around the long table, their veils pulled close over their heads and shoulders. They played
cards and read newspapers. Chinta was reading the Ramayana ; she continually set herself new
ambitions and at the moment wanted to be the first woman in the family to read the epic from
beginning to end. Occasionally the card-players chuckled. Chinta was sometimes called to look at
the cards one sister had; often the temptation was too great, and Chinta, adopting her frowning
card-playing manner, and not saying a word, stayed to play the hand, tapping each card before she
played it, throwing down the winning card with the crack she could do so well, then, still silent,
going back to the Ramayana . The midwife, an old, thin, inscrutable Madrassi, came to the hall and
sat on her haunches in a corner, smoking, silent, her eyes bright. Coffee simmered in the kitchen; its
smell filled the hall.
When the men returned, dripping, with Anand sleepily and tearfully walking beside them and
Govind carrying Mr. Biswas in his arms, there was relief, and some disappointment. Mr. Biswas
was not wild or violent; he made no speeches; he did not pretend he was driving a motorcar or
picking cocoa–the two actions popularly associated with insanity. He only looked deeply
exasperated and fatigued.
Govind and Mr. Biswas had not spoken since their fight. By carrying Mr. Biswas in his arms
Govind had put himself on the side of authority: he had assumed authority’s power to rescue and
assist when there was need, authority’s impersonal power to forgive.
Recognizing this, Chinta looked solicitously after Anand, drying his hair, taking off his wet
clothes and giving him some of Vidiadhar’s, giving him food, taking him upstairs and finding a
place for him among the sleeping boys.
Mr. Biswas was put in the Blue Room, given dry clothes and cautiously offered a cup of hot
sweetened milk with nutmeg, brandy and lumps of red butter. He stilled remaining fears by taking
the cup without accident, and drinking carefully.
He welcomed the warmth and reassurance of the room. Every wall was solid; the sound of the
rain was deadened; the ceiling of two and a half inch pitchpine concealed corrugated iron and
asphalt; the jalousied window, set in a deep embrasure, was unrattled by wind and rain.
He knew he was at Hanuman House; but he couldn’t assess what had gone before or what was
to come. He felt he was continually awakening to a new situation, which was in some way linked to
the memories he had, as instantaneous as snapshots, of other happenings that seemed to have spread
over an unmeasurable length of time. The rain on the wet bed; the trip in the motorcar; the
appearance of Ramkhilawan; the dead dog; the men talking outside; the thunder and lightning; the
room suddenly full of Seth and Govind and the others; and now this warm, closed room, yellowly
lit by a steady lamp; the dry clothes. As he concentrated, every object acquired a solidity, a
permanence. That marble topped table with the china cup and saucer and spoon: no other
arrangement of those objects was possible. He knew that this order was threatened; he had a feeling
of expectation and unease.
He lay as still as possible. Soon he was asleep. In his last moments of lucidity he thought the
sound of the rain, muffled and regular, was comforting.
It was still raining next morning, steadily, but the wind had dropped. It was dark, but there
was no lightning and thunder. The gutters around the house were full and muddy. In the High Street
the canals overflowed and the road was under water. The children could not go to school. There was
excitement among them, not only at the unusual weather and unexpected holiday, but also at the
overnight disturbance. Some had memories of being awakened briefly during the night; now Anand
was with them and his father was in the Blue Room. Some of the girls pretended to know all that
had happened. It was like the morning after a birth in the Rose Room: the mysteries were so well
kept and everything carried out so secretly that few of the younger children knew what was afoot
until they were told.
“Savi,” the children said, “your pappa here. In the Blue Room.”
But she didn’t want to go to the Blue Room or the Rose Room.
Outside, naked children splashed shrieking in the flooded road and swollen canals, racing
paper boats and wooden boats and even sticks.
Towards the middle of the morning the sky lightened and lifted, the rain thinned to a drizzle,
then stopped altogether. The clouds rolled back, the sky was suddenly blinding blue and there were
shadows on the water. Rapidly, their gurgling soon lost in the awakening every day din, canals
subsided, leaving a wash of twigs and dirt on the road. In yards, against fences, there were
tidemarks of debris and pebbles which looked as though they had been washed and sifted; around
stones dirt had been washed away; green leaves that had been torn down were partly buried in silt.
Roads and roofs dried, steaming, areas of dryness spreading out swiftly, like ink on a blotter. And
presently roads and yards were dry, except for the depressions where water had collected. Heat
nibbled at their edges, until even the depressions failed to reflect the blue sky. And the world was
dry again, except for the mud in the shelter of the trees.
The news about Mr. Biswas was broken to Shama. She suggested that the furniture from
Green Vale should be brought to Hanuman House.
The doctor came, a Roman Catholic Indian, but much respected by the Tulsis for his manners
and the extent of his property. He dismissed talk about having Mr. Biswas certified and said that
Mr. Biswas was suffering from nerves and a certain vitamin deficiency. He prescribed a course of
Sanatogen, a tonic called Ferrol with reputed iron-giving, body-building qualities, and Ovaltine. He
also said that Mr. Biswas was to have much rest, and should go to Port of Spain as soon as he was
better to see a specialist.
Almost as soon as the doctor had gone the thaumaturge came, an unsuccessful man with a
flashy turban and an anxious manner; his fees were low. He purified the Blue Room and erected
invisible barriers against evil spirits. He recommended that strips of aloe should be hung in
doorways and windows and said that the family ought to have known that they should always have
a black doll in the doorway of the hall to divert evil spirits: prevention was better than cure. Then he
inquired whether he couldn’t prepare a little mixture as well.
The offer was rejected. “Ovaltine, Ferrol, Sanatogen,” Seth said. “Give Mohun your mixture
and you turn him into a little capsule.”
But they hung the aloe; it was a natural purgative that cost nothing and large quantities were
always in the house. And they hung the black doll, one of a small ancient stock in the Tulsi Store,
an English line which had not appealed to the people of Arwacas.
That same afternoon a lorry brought the furniture from Green Vale. It was all damp and
discoloured. The polish on Shama’s dressingtable had turned white. The mattress was soaked and
smelly; the coconut fibre had swollen and stained the ticking. The cloth covers of Mr. Biswas’s
books were still sticky, and their colours had run along the edges of the pages, which had wrinkled
and stuck together.
The metal sections of the fourposter were left unmounted in that part of the long room which
had once been Shama’s and Mr. Biswas’s; the boards and the mattress were put out to dry in the
sun. The safe stood in the hall, near the doorway to the kitchen, looking almost new against the
sooty green wall. It still exhibited the Japanese coffee-set (the head of a Japanese woman at the
bottom of every cup, an embossed dragon breathing fire outside), Seth’s wedding present to Shama,
never used, only cleaned. The green table was also put in the hall, but in that jumble of unmatching
furniture was scarcely noticeable. The rockingchair was taken to the verandah upstairs.
Savi was pained to see the furniture so scattered and disregarded, and angered to see the
rockingchair being misused almost at once. At first the children stood on the cane-bottom and
rocked violently. From this they evolved a game: four or five climbed into the chair and rocked;
another four or five tried to pull them off. They fought over the chair and overturned it: that was the
climax of the game. Knowing that to protest was to make herself absurd, Savi went to the Rose
Room, with its basins and quaint jugs and tubes and smells, and complained to Shama.
Shama, always gentle with her children when she was alone with them, and especially gentle
during her confinements, stroked Savi’s hair and told her that she was not to mind, she was being
selfish, and if she complained to anybody else she would certainly cause a quarrel. Mr. Biswas was
sick, Shama said; and she herself was sick. Savi ought not to behave in a way that would annoy
anyone.
“And where have they put the bureau?” Shama asked.
“In the long room.”
Shama looked pleased.
Some of Mr. Biswas’s most elaborate placards had also been brought from Green Vale. They
were considered beautiful; though the sentiments, from a man long thought to be an atheist, caused
some astonishment. The placards were hung in the hall and the Book Room, and when the children
said, “Savi, your pappa did really paint those signs?” the pain at seeing the furniture scattered was
lessened.
The children said, “Savi, so all-you staying here for good now?”
Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept
again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some
far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and
this surrender had brought peace. He had controlled his disgust and fear when the men had come for
him. He was glad he had. Surrender had removed the world of damp walls and paper covered walls,
of hot sun and driving rain, and had brought him this: this worldless room, this nothingness. As the
hours passed he found he could piece together recent happenings, and he marvelled that he had
survived the horror. More and more frequently he forgot fear and questioning; sometimes, for as
much as a minute or so, he was unable, even when he tried, to re-enter fully the state of mind he had
lived through. There remained an unease, which did not seem real or actual and was more like an
indistinct, chilling memory of horror.
Further messages had been sent and visitors came. Pratap and Prasad, abashed by the size of
the house and conscious of their own condition, felt obliged to be kind to all the children. They
began by giving each child a penny; but they had underestimated the number of children; they
ended up by giving out halfpennies. They told Mr. Biswas exactly what they had been doing when
they got Message; it seemed that they both nearly missed Message; they had both, however, had
some signs on the night of the storm that something was wrong with Mr. Biswas and had told their
wives so; they urged Mr. Biswas to get confirmation from their wives. Mr. Biswas listened with a
sense of withdrawal. He asked after their families. Pratap and Prasad construed this as pure
politeness, and though there was little to talk about, dismissed their families as worthless of serious
consideration. And after making occasional solemn noises, looking down at their hats, examining
them from various angles, brushing the bands, they got up to go, sighing.
Ramchand, Mr. Biswas’s brother-in-law, was less restrained. He had acquired a city brashness
that went well with his uniform. He had left the country and the rum-factory years before and was
now a warden at the Lunatic Asylum in Port of Spain.
“Don’t think I shy of you,” he told Mr. Biswas. “I used to this. This is my work.”
He spoke of himself, his career, the Lunatic Asylum.
“You ain’t got a gramophone here?” he asked.
“Gramophone?”
“Music,” Ramchand said. “We does play music to them all the time.”
He spoke of the perquisites of the job as though the Lunatic Asylum had been organized
solely for his benefit.
“Take the canteen now. Everything there five cents and six cents cheaper than outside, you
know. But that is because they not running it to make a profit. If you ever want anything you must
let me know.”
“Sanatogen?”
“I will see. Look, why you don’t leave the country, man, and come to Port of Spain? A man
like you shouldn’t remain in this backward place. No wonder this thing happen to you. Come up
and spend some time with us. Dehuti always talking about you, you know.”
Mr. Biswas promised to think it over.
Ramchand walked heavily through the house and when he came into the hall shouted at
Sushila, whom he didn’t know, “Everything all right, maharajin ?”
“He looks like a real chamar –caste-type,” Sushila said.
“However much you wash a pig,” Chinta said, “you can’t turn it into a cow.”
That evening Seth went to the Blue Room.
“Well, Mohun. How you feeling?”
“All right, I think.” Mr. Biswas spoke with something like his humorous high-pitched voice.
“You thinking of going back to Green Vale?”
To his own surprise, Mr. Biswas found himself behaving in the old way. With an expression
of mock-horror he said, “Who? Me?”
“I glad you feel that way. As a matter of fact you can’t go back.”
“Look at me. I crying.”
“Guess what happen.”
“All the cane burn down.”
“Wrong. Only your house.”
“Burn down? You mean it insuranburn.”
“No, no. Not insuranburn. It burn fair and square. Green Vale people. Wicked like hell, man,
those people.”
Seth saw that Mr. Biswas was crying and looked away. But Seth misunderstood.
An immense relief had come upon Mr. Biswas. The anxiety, the fear, the anguish which had
kept his mind humming and his body taut now ebbed away. He could feel it ebbing; it was a
physical sensation; it left him weak and very weary. And he felt an enormous gratitude to Seth. He
wanted to embrace him, to promise eternal friendship, to make some vow.
“You mean,” he said at last, “that after all that rain they burn it down?” And he burst out
sobbing.
That night Shama gave birth to her fourth child, another girl.
Mr. Biswas’s books had been placed among those in the Book Room. Somewhere among
them was the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare . No entry was made on its endpaper of this new
birth.
The thin, short-winded and repetitive cry of the baby hardly made itself heard outside the
Rose Room. The midwife no longer squatted in the hall and smoked. She was busy. She washed,
she cleaned, she watched and ruled. After nine days she was paid and dismissed. The sisters told
Anand and Savi, “You have a new sister. Somebody else to get a share of your father’s property.”
And they told Anand, “You are lucky. You are still the only boy. But wait. One day you will get a
brother, and he will cut off your nose.”
Mr. Biswas mixed and drank Sanatogen, drank tablespoonfuls of Ferrol and, in the evenings,
glasses of Ovaltine. One day he remembered his fingernails. When he looked he saw they were
whole, unbitten. There were still the periods of darkness, the spasms of panic; but now he knew
they were not real and because he knew this he overcame them. He remained in the Blue Room,
feeling secure to be only a part of Hanuman House, an organism that possessed a life, strength and
power to comfort which was quite separate from the individuals who composed it.
“Savi, what you drinking?”
“Ovaltine.”
“Anand, what you drinking?”
“Ovaltine.”
“It nice?”
“Very nice.”
“Ma, Savi and Anand drinking Ovaltine. Their pappa give it to them.”
“Well, let me tell you, eh, boy, your father is not a millionaire to give you Ovaltine. You
hear?”
And the next day:
“Jai, what you drinking?”
“Ovaltine, like you.”
“Vidiadhar, you drinking Ovaltine too?”
“No. We drinking Milo. We like it better.”
Mr. Biswas came out from the Blue Room to the drawing-room with the thronelike chairs and
the statuary. He felt safe and even a little adventurous. He went through to the wooden house. In the
verandah Hari was reading. Instinctively Mr. Biswas took a step back. Then he remembered there
was no need. The two men looked at one another and looked away again.
Leaning on the verandah half-wall, with his back to Hari, Mr. Biswas thought about Hari’s
position in the family. Hari spent all his free time reading. He used this reading for nothing; he
disliked disputation of any sort. No one was able to check his knowledge of Sanskrit and his
scholarship had to be taken on trust. Yet he was respected inside the family and outside it. How did
Hari get to that position? Mr. Biswas wondered. Where did he start?
What would happen if he, Mr. Biswas, made a sudden appearance in the hall in dhoti and
beads and sacred thread? Let his top-knot grow again, as it had grown at Pundit Jairam’s. Would
Hanuman House care to have two sick scholars? But he couldn’t see himself as a holy man for long.
Sooner or later someone was bound to surprise him, in dhoti, top-knot, sacred thread and
caste-marks, reading The Manxman or The Atom .
Speculating about this, he reviewed his situation. He was the father of four children, and his
position was as it had been when he was seventeen, unmarried and ignorant of the Tulsis. He had no
vocation, no reliable means of earning a living. The job at Green Vale was over; he could not rest in
the Blue Room forever; soon he would have to make a decision. Yet he felt no anxiety. The second
to second agony and despair of those days at Green Vale had given him an experience of
unhappiness against which everything had now to be measured. He was more fortunate than most
people. His children would never starve; they would always be sheltered and clothed. It didn’t
matter if he were at Green Vale or Arwacas, if he were alive or dead.
His money dwindled: Ovaltine, Ferrol, Sanatogen; the doctor’s fees, the midwife’s, the
thaumaturge’s. And there was no more money to come.
One evening Seth said, “That tin of Ovaltine could very well be your last, if you don’t decide
to do something.”
Decide. What was there to decide?
There was room for him at Hanuman House if he stayed. If he left he would not be missed. He
had not claimed his children; they avoided him and were embarrassed when they met him.
But it was only when Seth said, “Mai and Owad are coming home this week-end,” meaning
that the Blue Room had to be prepared for Owad, it was only then that Mr. Biswas thought of
action, unwilling to move to any other part of the house, unwilling to face Mrs. Tulsi and the god.
The small brown cardboard suitcase, acquired in exchange for a large number of Anchor
Cigarette packets, and decorated on both sides with his monogram, was enough for what he
intended to take. He remembered Shama’s taunt: “When you came to us you had no more clothes
than you could hang up on a nail.” He still had few clothes; they were all crumpled and dirty. The
cork hat he decided to leave; he had always found it absurd, and it belonged to the barracks. He
could always send for his books. But he packed his paintbrushes. Through every move they had
survived; the soft candle on the bristle of one or two had hardened, cracked and turned to powder.
He wanted to leave early in the morning, to have as much time as possible before it became
dark. The crumpled clothes felt loose when he put them on; his trousers sagged; he had grown
thinner. He remembered the morning the towel had fallen from him in front of the twelve
barrackrooms.
When Savi brought him the cocoa and biscuits and butter he told her, “I am going away.”
She didn’t look surprised or disappointed, and didn’t ask where he was going.
He was going out into the world, to test it for its power to frighten. The past was counterfeit, a
series of cheating accidents. Real life, and its especial sweetness, awaited; he was still beginning.
He wondered whether he should go to see Shama and the baby. His senses recoiled. As soon
as he heard the children leave for school he went downstairs. He was seen, but no one called out to
him: the suitcase was not of a significant size.
The High Street was already busy. The market was alive: a high smell of meat and fish, a
steady dull roar enlivened by shrieks and the ringing of bells. The haberdashers were coming in, on
horse-carts, donkey-carts and ox-carts: ambitious men who set up little boxes and exposed stocks of
combs and hairpins and brushes in front of large stores that sold the same things.
The spasms of terror didn’t come. The knots of fear were still in his stomach, but they were so
subdued he knew he could ignore them. The world had been restored to him. He looked at the nails
of his left hand; they were still whole. He tested them against his palm; they were sharp and cutting.
He walked past the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign; past the rumshop with the vast awning;
past the Roman Catholic church; the court house; past the police station, primly ochre-and-red, its
lawn and hedges trimmed, the drive lined with large whitewashed stones and palm trees which,
whitewashed halfway up their trunks, looked like the legs of Pratap and Prasad when, as boys, they
returned from the buffalo-pond.
Part Two
1. “Amazing Scenes”
To the city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life,
and where at Sikkim Street he was to die fifteen years later, Mr. Biswas came by accident. When he
left Hanuman House and his wife and four children, the last of whom he had not seen, his main
concern was to find a place to pass the night. It was still early morning. The sun was rising directly
above the High Street in a dazzling haze, against which everyone was silhouetted, outlined in gold,
and attached to shadows so elongated that movements appeared uncoordinated and awkward. The
buildings on either side were in damp shadow.
At the road junction Mr. Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved
north: tarpaulin-covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr. Biswas, and the
conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard. North lay Ajodha and
Tara, and his mother. South lay his brothers. None of them could refuse to take him in. But to none
of them did he want to go: it was too easy to picture himself among them. Then he remembered that
north, too, lay Port of Spain and Ramchand, his brother-in-law. And it was while he was trying to
decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially
unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of brakes and a
racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and
seized Mr. Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, “Port of Spain, man, Port
of Spain”.
As a conductor of Ajodha’s buses Mr. Biswas had seized the suitcases of many wayfarers, and
he knew that in these circumstances a conductor had to be aggressive to combat any possible
annoyance. But now, finding himself suddenly separated from his suitcase and hearing the
impatience in the conductor’s voice, he was cowed, and nodded. “Up, up, man,” the conductor said,
and Mr. Biswas climbed into the vehicle while the conductor stowed away his suitcase.
Whenever the bus stopped to release a passenger or kidnap another, Mr. Biswas wondered
whether it was too late to get off and make his way south. But the decision had been made, and he
was without energy to go back on it; besides, he could get at his suitcase only with the cooperation
of the conductor. He fixed his eyes on a house, as small and as neat as a doll’s house, on the distant
hills of the Northern Range; and as the bus moved north, he allowed himself to be puzzled that the
house didn’t grow any bigger, and to wonder, as a child might, whether the bus would eventually
come to that house.
It was the crop season. In the sugarcane fields, already in parts laid low, cutters and loaders
were at work, knee-deep in trash. Along the tracks between fields mudstained, grey-black buffaloes
languidly pulled carts carrying high, bristling loads of sugarcane. But soon the land changed and the
air was less sticky. Sugarcane gave way to rice-fields, the muddy colour of their water lost in the
flawless reflections of the blue sky; there were more trees; and instead of mud huts there were
wooden houses, small and old, but finished, painted and jalousied, with fretwork, frequently broken,
along the eaves, above doors and windows and around fern-smothered verandahs. The plain fell
behind, the mountains grew nearer; but the doll’s house remained as small as ever and when the bus
turned into the Eastern Main Road Mr. Biswas lost sight of it. The road was strung with many wires
and looked important; the bus moved westwards through thickening traffic and increasing noise,
past one huddled red and ochre settlement after another, until the hills rose directly from the road on
the right, and from the left came a smell of swamp and sea, which presently appeared, level, grey
and hazy, and they were in Port of Spain, where the stale salt smell of the sea mixed with the sharp
sweet smells of cocoa and sugar from the warehouses.
He had feared the moment of arrival and wished that the bus would go on and never stop, but
when he got down into the yard next to the railway station his uncertainty at once fell away, and he
felt free and excited. It was a day of freedom such as he had had only once before, when one of
Ajodha’s relations had died and the rumshop had been closed and everybody had gone away. He
drank a coconut from a cart in Marine Square. How wonderful to be able to do that in the middle of
the morning! He walked on crowded pavements beside the slow, continuous motor traffic, noted the
size and number of the stores and caf s and restaurants, the trams, the high standard of the shop
signs, the huge cinemas, closed after the pleasures of last night (which he had spent dully at
Arwacas), but with posters, still wet with paste, promising fresh gaieties for that afternoon and
evening. He comprehended the city whole; he did not isolate the individual, see the man behind the
desk or counter, behind the pushcart or the steering-wheel of the bus; he saw only the activity, felt
the call to the senses, and knew that below it all there was an excitement, which was hidden, but
waiting to be grasped.
It wasn’t until four, when stores and offices closed and the cinemas opened, that he thought of
making his way to the address Ramchand had given. This was in the Woodbrook area and Mr.
Biswas, enchanted by the name, was disappointed to find an unfenced lot with two old unpainted
wooden houses and many makeshift sheds. It was too late to turn back, to make another decision,
another journey; and after making inquiries of a Negro woman who was fanning a coal-pot in one
shed, he picked his way past bleaching stones, a slimy open gutter and a low open gutter and a low
clothes-wire, to the back, where he saw Dehuti fanning a coal-pot in another shed, one wall of
which was the corrugated iron fence of the sewer trace.
His disappointment was matched by their surprise when, after the exclamations of greeting, he
made it clear that he intended to spend some time with them. But when he announced that he had
left Shama, they were welcoming again, their solicitude touched not only with excitement but also
with pleasure that in a time of trouble he had come to them.
“You stay here and rest as long as you want,” Ramchand said. “Look, you have a
gramophone. You just stay here and play music to yourself.”
And Dehuti even dropped the sullenness with which she always greeted Mr. Biswas, a
sullenness which, no longer defensive, held no meaning and was only an attitude fixed by habit,
simplifying relationships.
Presently Dehuti’s younger son came back from school and Dehuti said sternly, “Take out
your books and let me hear what you learn at school today.”
The boy didn’t hesitate. He took out Captain Cutteridge’s Reader , Standard Four, and read an
account of an escape from a German prison camp in 1917.
Mr. Biswas congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.
“He is a good little reader,” Ramchand said.
“And what is the meaning of ‘distribute’?” Dehuti asked, still stern.
“Share out,” the boy said.
“I didn’t know that at his age,” Mr. Biswas said to Ramchand.
“And bring out your copy book and show me what you do in arithmetic today.”
The boy took the book out to her and Dehuti said, “It look passable. But I don’t know
anything about arithmetic. Take it to your uncle, let him see.”
Mr. Biswas didn’t know anything about arithmetic either, but he saw the approving red ticks
and again congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.
“This education is a helluva thing,” Ramchand said. “Any little child could pick up. And yet
the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on.”
Dehuti and Ramchand lived in two rooms. One of these Mr. Biswas shared with the boy. And
though from the outside the unpainted house with its rusting roof and weatherbeaten, broken boards
looked about to fall down, the wood inside had kept some of its colour, and the rooms were clean
and well kept. The furniture, including the hatrack with the diamond shaped glass, was brilliantly
polished. The area between the kitchen shed and the back room was roofed and partly walled; so
that the open yard could be forgotten, and there was room and even privacy.
But at night gruff, intimate whispers came through the partitions, reminding Mr. Biswas that
he lived in a crowded city. The other tenants were all Negroes. Mr. Biswas had never lived close to
people of this race before, and their proximity added to the strangeness, the adventure of being in
the city. They differed from country Negroes in accent, dress and manner. Their food had strange
meaty smells, and their lives appeared less organized. Women ruled men. Children were
disregarded and fed, it seemed, at random; punishments were frequent and brutal, without any of the
ritual that accompanied floggings at Hanuman House. Yet the children all had fine physiques,
disfigured only by projecting navels, which were invariably uncovered; for the city children wore
trousers and exposed their tops, unlike country children, who wore vests and exposed their bottoms.
And unlike country children, who were timid, the city children were half beggars, half bullies.
The organization of the city fascinated Mr. Biswas: the street lamps going on at the same
time, the streets swept in the middle of the night, the rubbish collected by the scavenging carts early
in the morning; the furtive, macabre sounds of the nightsoil removers; the newsboys, really men;
the bread van, the milk that came, not from cows, but in rum bottles stopped with brown paper. Mr.
Biswas was impressed when Dehuti and Ramchand spoke proprietorially of streets and shops,
talking with the ease of people who knew their way about the baffling city. Even about Ramchand’s
going out to work every morning there was something knowing, brave and enviable.
And with Mr. Biswas Ramchand was indeed the knowledgeable townsman. He took Mr.
Biswas to the Botanical Gardens and the Rock Gardens and Government House. They went up
Chancellor Hill and looked down at the ships in the harbour. For Mr. Biswas this was a moment of
deep romance. He had seen the sea, but didn’t know that Port of Spain was really a port, at which
ocean liners called from all parts of the world.
Mr. Biswas was amused by Ramchand’s city manners and allowed himself to be patronized
by him. Ramchand had in any case always managed to do that, even when he had just stopped being
a yard boy at Tara’s. Ostracized from the community into which he was born, he had shown the
futility of its sanctions. He had simply gone outside it. He had acquired a loudness and heartiness
which was alien and which he did not always carry off easily. He spoke English most of the time,
but with a rural Indian accent which made his attempts to keep up with the ever-changing Port of
Spain slang absurd. And Mr. Biswas suffered when, as sometimes happened, Ramchand was
rebuffed; when, for instance, partly to impress Mr. Biswas, he overdid the heartiness in his relations
with the Negroes in the yard and was met with cold surprise.
At the end of a fortnight Ramchand said, “Don’t worry about getting a job yet. You suffering
from brain fag, and you got to have lots of rest.”
He spoke without irony, but Mr. Biswas, now practically without money, had begun to feel
burdened by his freedom. He was no longer content to walk about the city. He wanted to be part of
it, to be one of those who stood at the black and yellow busstops in the morning, one of those he
saw behind the windows of offices, one of those to whom the evenings and week-ends brought
relaxation. He thought of taking up sign-writing again. But how was he to go about it? Could he
simply put up a sign in front of the house and wait?
Ramchand said, “Why you don’t try to get a job in the Mad House? Good pay, free uniform,
and a damn good canteen. Everything there five and six cents cheaper. Ask Dehuti.”
“Yes,” she said, “Everything there much cheaper.”
Mr. Biswas saw himself in the uniform, walking alone through long rooms of howling
maniacs.
“Well, why the hell not?” he said. “Is something to do.”
Ramchand looked slightly offended. He mentioned difficulties; and though he had contacts
and influence, he was not sure that it would create a good impression if he made use of them. “That
is the only thing that keeping me back,” he said. “The impression .”
Then one day Mr. Biswas was surprised by the spasms of fear. They were weak and
intermittent, but they persisted, and reminded him to look at his hands. The nails were all bitten
down.
His freedom was over.
And as a last act of this freedom he decided to go to the specialist the Arwacas doctor had
recommended. The specialist’s office was at the northern end of St. Vincent Street, not far from the
Savannah. House and grounds suggested whiteness and order. The fence pillars were freshly
whitewashed; the brass plaque glittered; the lawn was trimmed; not a piece of earth was out of place
on the flower-beds; and on the drive the light-grey gravel, free from impurities, reflected the
sunlight.
He went through a white-walled verandah and found himself in a high white room. A Chinese
receptionist in a stiff white uniform sat at a desk on which calendar, diary, inkwells, ledgers and
lamp were neatly disposed. A fan whirred in one corner. A number of people reclined on low
luxurious chairs, reading magazines or talking in whispers. They didn’t look sick: there was not a
bandage or an oiled face among them, no smell of bay rum or ammonia. This was far removed from
Mrs. Tulsi’s Rose Room; and it was hard to believe that in the same city Ramchand and Dehuti
lived in two rooms of a crumbling house. Mr. Biswas began to feel that he had come on false
pretences; there was nothing wrong with him.
“You have an appointment?” The receptionist spoke with the nasal, elided Chinese highness,
and Mr. Biswas detected hostility in her manner.
Fish-face , he commented mentally.
The receptionist started.
Mr. Biswas realized with horror that he had whispered the word; he had not lost the Green
Vale habit of speaking his thoughts aloud. “Appointment?” he said. “I have a letter.” He took out
the small brown envelope which the Arwacas doctor had given him. It was creased, dirty, fuzzy
along the edges, the corners curled.
The receptionist deftly slit the envelope open with a tortoiseshell knife. As she read the letter
Mr. Biswas felt exposed, and more of a fraud than ever. The blunder he had made worried him. He
determined to be cautious. He clenched his teeth and tried to imagine whether “fish-face”, heard in
a whisper, couldn’t be mistaken for something quite different, something even complimentary.
Fish-face .
The receptionist looked up.
Mr. Biswas smiled.
“You want to make an appointment, or you prefer to wait?” The receptionist was cold.
Mr. Biswas decided to wait. He sat on a sofa, sank right into it, fell back and sank further, his
knees rising high. He didn’t know what to do with his eyes. It was too late to get a magazine. He
counted the people in the room. Eight. He had a long time to wait. They probably all had
appointments; they were all correctly ill.
A short limping man came in noisily, spoke loudly to the receptionist, stumped over to the
sofa, sank into it, breathing hard, and stretched out a short straight leg.
At least there was something wrong with him . Mr. Biswas eyed the leg and wondered how
the man was going to get up again.
The surgery door opened, a man was heard but not seen, a woman came out, and someone
else went in.
A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers .
Mr. Biswas felt the lame man’s eyes on him.
He thought about money. He had three dollars. A country doctor charged a dollar; but illness
was clearly more expensive in this room.
The lame man breathed heavily.
Money was too worrying to think about, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist too dangerous. His
mind wandered and settled on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn , which he had read at
Ramchand’s. He smiled at the memory of Huckleberry Finn, whose trousers “bagged low and
contained nothing”, nigger Jim who had seen ghosts and told stories.
He chuckled.
When he looked up he intercepted an exchange of glances between the receptionist and the
lame man. He would have left right then, but he was too deeply wedged in his chair; if he attempted
to rise he would create a disturbance and draw attention to himself. He became aware of his clothes:
the washed-out khaki trousers with the frayed turn-ups, the washed-out blue shirt with the cuffs
given one awkward fold backwards (no shirt size fitted him absolutely: collars were too tight or
sleeves too long), the little brown hat resting in the valley formed by his thighs and belly. And he
had only three dollars.
You know , I am not a sick man at all.
The lame man cleared his throat noisily, very noisily for a small man, and agitated his stiff
leg.
Mr. Biswas watched it.
Suddenly he had levered himself up from the sofa, rocking the lame man violently, and was
walking towards the receptionist. Concentrating on his English, he said, “I have changed my mind. I
am feeling much better, thank you.” And, putting on his hat, he went towards the door.
“What about your letter?” the receptionist asked, surprised into her Trinidad accent.
“Keep it,” Mr. Biswas said. “File it. Burn it. Sell it.”
He went through the tiled verandah, crossed the black afternoon shadow on the drive,
emerged into the sun, noted a bed of suffering zinnias as he moved briskly down the dazzling gravel
to St. Vincent Street. The wind from the Savannah was like a blessing. His mind was hot. And now
he saw the city as made up of individuals, each of whom had his place in it. The large buildings
around the Savannah were white and blank and silent in the heat.
He came to the War Memorial Park, sat on a bench in the shade of a tree and studied the
statue of a belligerent soldier. Shadows were black and well-defined and encouraged repose and
languor. His stomach was hurting.
His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never
counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already
been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and
cheating.
He welcomed the stomach pains. They had not occurred for months and it seemed to him that
they marked the return of the wholeness of his mind, the restoration of the world; they indicated
how far he had lifted himself from the abyss of the past months, and reminded him of the anguish
against which everything now had to be measured.
Reluctantly, for it was a pleasure just to sit and let the wind play about his face and neck and
down his shirt, he left the park and walked south, away from the Savannah. The quiet, withdrawn
houses disappeared; pavements grew narrower and higher and more crowded; there were shops and
caf s and buses, cars, trams and bicycles, horns and bells and shouts. He crossed Park Street and
continued towards the sea. In the distance, above the roofs at the end of the street, he saw the tops
of masts of sloops and schooners at St. Vincent Jetty.
He passed the courts and came to the Red House, bulky in red sandstone. Part of the asphalt
forecourt was marked off in white and lettered RESERVED FOR JUDGES. He went up the central
steps and found himself under a high dome. He saw many green notice-boards and an unplaying
fountain. The basin of the fountain was wet, and held many dead leaves and empty cigarette
packets.
It was busy under the dome, with messengers in khaki uniforms and clerks in well-ironed
clothes carrying buff or green folders, and with people continually passing between St. Vincent
Street and Woodford Square, where the professional beggars lounged about the bandstand and on
benches, so confident of their appearance that they disdained to beg, spending most of their time
patching the rags they wore like a uniform, garments thick and shaggy and richly variegated, small
rag sewn on to small rag, labours of love. Even about the beggars there was an air of establishment.
Woodford Square, cool under the trees and attractively dappled with light, was theirs; they cooked,
ate and slept there, disturbed only by occasional political gatherings. They worried no one, and
since they all had excellent physiques, and one or two were reputed to be millionaires, no one
worried them.
On the green notice-boards, which also served to screen the offices on either side, there were
government notices. Mr. Biswas was reading these when he heard someone call out. He turned to
see an elderly Negro, respectably dressed, waving to him with a one-armed pair of spectacles.
“You want a certificate?” The Negro’s lips snapped ferociously shut between words.
“Certificate?”
“Birth, marriage, death.” The Negro adjusted his mutilated spectacles low over his nose and
from a shirt pocket stuffed with paper and pencils he pulled out a sheet of paper and let his pencil
circle impatiently above it.
“I don’t want any certificate.”
The pencil stopped playing. “I can’t understand it.” The Negro put away paper and pencil, sat
down on a long, shiny bench, took off his spectacles, thrust the scratched, white end of the
remaining arm into his mouth, and shook his legs. “Nobody wanting certificates these days. If you
ask me, the trouble is that nowadays it just have too damn many searchers. When I sit down on this
bench in 1919 I was the onliest searcher. Today every Tom, Dick or Harry running up and down
this place”–he jerked his chin towards the fountain–“calling themself searchers.” His lips snapped
ferociously. “You sure you don’t want a certificate? You never know when these things could be
useful. I get lots of certificates for Indians, you know. In fact, I prefer getting certificates for
Indians. And I could get it for you this afternoon self. I know one of the clerks inside there.” He
waved to the office at his back and Mr. Biswas saw a high, polished brown counter and pale green
walls, lit, on this bright afternoon, by electric light.
“Helluva job,” the Negro said. “No Christmas and Easter for me, you know. At times like that
nobody want any certificate at all. And every day, whether I search for ten or two or no certificates,
that damn clerk inside there got to get his twenty cigarettes.”
Mr. Biswas began to move away.
“Still, if you know anybody who want a certificate–birth, death, marriage, marriage in
extremis –send them to me. I come here every morning at eight o”clock sharp. The name is Pastor.”
Mr. Biswas left Pastor, overwhelmed by the thought that in the office behind the green
notice-board records were kept of every birth and death. And they had nearly missed him! He went
down the steps into St. Vincent Street and continued south towards the masts. Even Pastor, for all
his grumbling, had found his place. What had driven him on a day in 1919 to take a seat outside the
Registrar-General’s Department and wait for illiterates wanting certificates?
He had thought himself back into the mood he had known at Green Vale, when he couldn’t
bear to look at the newspapers on the wall. And now he perceived that the starts of apprehension he
felt at the sight of every person in the street did not come from fear at all; only from regret, envy,
despair.
And, thinking of the newspapers on the barrackroom wall, he was confronted with the
newspaper offices: the Guardian , the Gazette , the Mirror , the Sentinel , facing each other across
the street. Machinery rattled like distant trains; through open windows came the warm smell of oil,
ink and paper. The Sentinel was the paper for which Misir, the Aryan, was a cent-a-line country
correspondent. All the stories Mr. Biswas had got by heart from the newspapers in the barrackroom
returned to him. Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when … Passers-by stopped and stared
yesterday when…
He turned down a lane, pushed open a door on the right, and then another. The noise of
machinery was louder. An important, urgent noise, but it did not intimidate him. He said to the man
behind the high caged desk, “I want to see the editor.”
Amazing scenes were witnessed in St . Vincent Street yesterday when Mohun Biswas, 31…
“You got an appointment?”
… assaulted a receptionist.
“No,” Mr. Biswas said irritably.
In an interview with our reporter … In an interview with our special correspondent late last
night Mr. Biswas said…
“The editor is busy. You better go and see Mr. Woodward.”
“You just tell the editor I come all the way from the country to see him.”
Amazing scenes were witnessed in St . Vincent Street yesterday when Biswas, 31,
unemployed, of no fixed address, assaulted a receptionist at the offices of the TRINIDAD
SENTINEL . People ducked behind desks as Biswas, father of four, walked into the building with
guns blazing, shot the editor and four reporters dead, and then set fire to the building. Passers-by
stopped and stared as the flames rose high, fanned by a strong breeze. Several tons of paper were
destroyed and the building itself gutted. In an exclusive interview with our special correspondent
late last night Mr. Biswas said…
“This way,” the receptionist said, climbing down from his desk, and led Mr. Biswas into a
large room which belied the urgent sounds of typewriters and machinery. Many typewriters were
idle, many desks untenanted. A group of men in shirtsleeves stood around a green water-cooler in
one corner; other groups of two or three were seated on desks; one man was spinning a swivel-chair
with his foot. There was a row of frosted-glass cubicles along one wall, and the receptionist, going
ahead of Mr. Biswas, knocked on one of these, pushed the door open, allowed Mr. Biswas to enter,
and closed the door.
A small fat man, pink and oiled from the heat, half rose from behind a desk littered with
paper. Slabs of lead, edged with type, served as paperweights. And Mr. Biswas was thrilled to see
the proof of an article, headlined and displayed. It was a glimpse of a secret; isolated on the large
white sheet, the article had an eminence tomorrow’s readers would never see. Mr. Biswas’s
excitement increased. And he liked the man he saw before him.
“And what is your story?” the editor asked, sitting down.
“I don’t have a story. I want a job.”
Mr. Biswas saw almost with delight that he had embarrassed the editor; and he pitied him for
not having the decision to throw him out. The editor went pinker and looked down at the proof. He
was unhappy in the heat and seemed to be melting. His cheeks flowed into his neck; his neck
bulged over his collar; his round shoulders drooped; his belly hung over his waistband; and he was
damp all over. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Have you worked on a paper before?”
Mr. Biswas thought about the articles he had promised to write, but hadn’t, for Misir’s paper,
which had never appeared. “Once or twice,” he said.
The editor looked at the door, as though for help. “Do you mean once? Or do you mean
twice?”
“I have read a lot.” Mr. Biswas said, getting out of dangerous ground.
The editor played with a slab of lead.
“Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Jacob Boehme, Mark Twain. Hall Caine, Mark Twain,” Mr.
Biswas repeated. “Samuel Smiles.”
The editor looked up.
“Marcus Aurelius.”
The editor smiled.
“Epictetus.”
The editor continued to smile, and Mr. Biswas smiled back, to let the editor know that he
knew he was sounding absurd.
“You read those people just for pleasure, eh?”
Mr. Biswas recognized the cruel intent of the question, but he didn’t mind. “No,” he said.
“Just for the encouragement.” All his excitement died.
There was a pause. The editor looked at the proof. Through the frosted glass Mr. Biswas saw
figures passing in the newsroom. He became aware of the noise again: the traffic in the street, the
regular rattle of machinery, the intermittent chatter of typewriters, occasional laughter.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-one.”
“You have come from the country, you are thirty-one, you have never written, and you want
to be a reporter. What do you do?”
Mr. Biswas thought of estate-driver, exalted it to overseer, rejected it, rejected shopkeeper,
rejected unemployed. He said, “Sign-painter.”
The editor rose. “I have just the job for you.”
He led Mr. Biswas out of the office, through the newsroom (the group around the
water-cooler had broken up), past a machine unrolling sheets of typewritten paper, into a partially
dismantled room where carpenters were at work, through more rooms, and then into a yard. Down
the lane at one end Mr. Biswas could see the street he had left a few minutes before.
The editor walked about the yard, pointing. “Here and here,” he said. “And here.”
Mr. Biswas was given paint and a brush, and he spent the rest of the afternoon writing signs:
No Admittance to Wheeled Vehicles, No Entry, Watch out for Vans, No Hands Wanted.
Around him machinery clattered and hummed; the carpenters beat rhythms on the nails as
they drove them in.
Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when …
“Tcha!” he exclaimed angrily.
Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when Mohun Biswas , 31, a sign-painter, set to
work on the offices of the TRINIDAD SENTINEL . Passers-by stopped and stared as Biswas, father
of four, covered the walls with obscene phrases. Women hid their faces in their hands, screamed
and fainted. A traffic jam was created in St. Vincent Street and police, under Superintendent
Grieves, were called in to restore order. Interviewed by our special correspondent late last night,
Biswas said…
“Didn’t even know who Marcus Aurelius was, the crab-catching son of a bitch.”
… interviewed late last night, Biswas… Mr. Biswas said, “The ordinary man cannot be
expected to know the meaning of ‘No Admittance’.”
“What, still here?”
It was the editor. He was less pink, less oiled, and his clothes were dry. He was smoking a
short fat cigar; it repeated and emphasized his shape.
The yard was in shadow; the light was going. Machinery clattered more assertively: a series
of separate noises; the carpenters’ rhythms had ceased. In the street traffic had subsided, footsteps
resounded; the passing of a motor, the trilling of a bicycle bell could be heard from afar.
“But that is good,” the editor said. “Very good indeed.”
You sound surprised, you little chunk of lard. “I got the letters from a magazine.” You think
you are the only one laughing, eh?
“I could eat the Gill Sans R,” the editor said. “You know, I don’t really see why you should
want to give up your job.”
“Not enough money.”
“Not much in this either.”
Mr. Biswas pointed to a sign. “No wonder you are doing your best to keep people out.”
“Oh. No Hands Wanted.”
“A nice little sign,” Mr. Biswas said.
The editor smiled and then was convulsed with laughter.
And Mr. Biswas, the clown again, laughed too.
“That was for carpenters and labourers,” the editor said. “Come tomorrow, if you are serious.
We’ll give you a month’s trial. But no pay.”
A chance encounter had led him to sign-writing. Sign-writing had taken him to Hanuman
House and the Tulsis. Sign-writing found him a place on the Sentinel . And neither for the Tulsi
Store signs nor for those at the Sentinel was he paid.
He worked with enthusiasm. His reading had given him an extravagant vocabulary but Mr.
Burnett, the editor, was patient. He gave Mr. Biswas copies of London papers, and Mr. Biswas
studied their style until he could turn out presentable imitations. It was not long before he developed
a feeling for the shape and scandalizing qualities of every story. To this he added something of his
own. And it was part of his sudden good fortune that he was working for the Sentinel and not for
the Guardian or the Gazette . For the facetiousness that came to him as soon as he put pen to paper,
and the fantasy he had hitherto dissipated in quarrels with Shama and in invective against the
Tulsis, were just the things Mr. Burnett wanted.
“Let them get their news from the other papers,” he said. “That is exactly what they are doing
at the moment anyway. The only way we can get readers is by shocking them. Get them angry.
Frighten them. You just give me one good fright, and the job is yours.”
Next day Mr. Biswas turned in a story.
Mr. Burnett said, “You made this one up?”
Mr. Biswas nodded.
“Pity.”
The story was headlined:
Four Children Roasted in Hut Blaze
Mother, Helpless, Watches
“I liked the last paragraph,” Mr. Burnett said.
This read: “Sightseers are pouring into the stricken village, and we do not feel we are in a
position to divulge its name as yet. ‘In times like this,’ an old man told me last night, ‘we want to be
left alone.’ “
Abandoning fiction, Mr. Biswas persevered. And Mr. Burnett continued to give advice.
“I think you’d better go a little easy on the amazing scenes being witnessed. And how about
turning your passers-by into ordinary people every now and then? ‘Considerably’ is a big word
meaning ‘very’, which is a pointless word any way. And look. ‘Several’ has seven letters. ‘Many’
has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning. I liked your piece on the Bonny
Baby Competition. You made me laugh. But you haven’t frightened me yet.”
“Anything funny happen at the Mad House?” Mr. Biswas asked Ramchand that evening.
Ramchand looked annoyed.
And Mr. Biswas gave up the idea of an exposure piece on the Mad House.
On his way to the Sentinel next morning he called at a police station. From there he went to
the mortuary, then to the City Council’s stable-yard. When he got to the Sentinel he sat down at a
free desk–no desk was yet his–and wrote in pencil:
Last week the Sentinel Bonny Baby Competition was held at Prince’s Building. And late last
night the body of a dead male baby was found, neatly wrapped in a brown paper parcel, on the
rubbish dump at Cocorite.
I have seen the baby and I am in a position to say that it did not win a prize in our Bonny
Baby Competition.
Experts are not yet sure whether the baby was specially taken to the rubbish dump, or simply
put out with the rubbish in the usual way.
Hezekiah James, 43, unemployed, who discovered the dead baby, told me…
“Good, good,” Mr. Burnett said. “But heavy. Heavy. Why not ‘I am able’ instead of ‘I am in a
position’?”
“I got that from the Daily Express .”
“All right. Let it pass. But promise me that for a whole week you won’t be in a position to do
or say anything. It’s going to be hard. But try. What sort of baby?”
“Sort?”
“Black, white, green?”
“White. Blueish when I saw it, really. I thought, though, that we didn’t mention race, except
for Chinese.”
“Listen to the man. If I ran across a black baby on the rubbish dump at Banbury, do you think
I would just say a baby?”
And the headlines the next day read:
White Baby Found on Rubbish Dump
In Brown Paper Parcel
Did Not Win Bonny Baby Competition
“Just one other thing,” Mr. Burnett said. “Lay off babies for a while.”
The job was urgent: the paper had to be printed every evening; by early morning it had to be
in every part of the island. This was not the false urgency of writing signs for shops at Christmas or
looking after crops. And even after a dozen years Mr. Biswas never lost the thrill, which he then felt
for the first time, at seeing what he had written the day before appear in print, in the newspaper
delivered free.
“You haven’t given me a real shock yet,” Mr. Burnett said.
And Mr. Biswas wanted to shock Mr. Burnett. It seemed unlikely that he would ever do so,
for in his fourth week he was made shipping reporter, taking the place of a man who had been killed
at the docks by a crane load of flour accidentally falling from a great height. It was the tourist
season and the harbour was full of ships from America and Europe. Mr. Biswas went aboard
German ships, was given excellent lighters, saw photographs of Adolf Hitler, and was bewildered
by the Heil Hitler salutes.
Excitement!
The ships sailed away with their scorched tourists, distinguished by their tropical clothes, after
only a few hours. But they had come from places with famous names. And in the Sentinel office
news from those places spilled out continually on to spools of paper. Outside was the hot sun, the
horse-dunged streets, the choked slums, the rooms where he lived with Ramchand and Dehuti; and,
beyond that, the level acres of sugarcane, the sunken ricelands, the repetitive labour of his brothers,
the short roads leading from known settlement to known settlement, the Tulsi establishment, the old
men who gathered every evening in the arcade of Hanuman House and would travel no more. But
within the walls of the office every part of the world was near.
He went aboard American ships on the South American tourist route, interviewed
businessmen, had difficulty in understanding the American accent, saw the galleys and marvelled at
the quantity and quality of the food thrown away. He copied down passenger lists, was invited by a
ship’s cook to join a smuggling ring that dealt in camera flash-bulbs, declined and was unable to
write the story because it would have incriminated his late predecessor.
He interviewed an English novelist, a man about his own age, but still young, and shining
with success. Mr. Biswas was impressed. The novelist’s name was unknown to him and to the
readers of the Sentinel , but Mr. Biswas had thought of all writers as dead and associated the
production of books not only with distant lands, but with distant ages. He visualized headlines–
FAMOUS NOVELIST SAYS PORT OF SPAIN WORLD’S THIRD WICKEDEST CITY–and fed
the novelist with leading questions. But the novelist considered Mr. Biswas’s inquiries to have a
sinister political motive, and made slow statements about the island’s famed beauty and his desire to
see as much of it as possible.
I want to see that frighten anybody, Mr. Biswas thought.
(Years later Mr. Biswas came across the travel-book the novelist had written about the region.
He saw himself described as an “incompetent, aggrieved and fanatical young reporter, who
distastefully noted my guarded replies in a laborious longhand”.)
Then a ship called on the way to Brazil.
Within twenty-four hours Mr. Biswas was notorious, the Sentinel , reviled on every hand,
momentarily increased its circulation, and Mr. Burnett was jubilant.
He said, “You have even chilled me.”
The story, the leading one on page three, read:
Daddy Comes Home in a Coffin
U.S. Explorer’s Last Journey
On Ice
by M. Biswas
Somewhere in America in a neat little red-roofed cottage four children ask their mother every
day, “Mummy, when is Daddy coming home?”
Less than a year ago Daddy–George Elmer Edrnan, the celebrated traveller and explorer–left
home to explore the Amazon.
Well, I have news for you, kiddies.
Daddy is on his way home.
Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin.
Mr. Biswas was taken on the staff of the Sentinel at a salary of fifteen dollars a fortnight.
“The first thing you must do,” Mr. Burnett said, “is to get out and get yourself a suit. I can’t
have my best reporter running about in those clothes.”
It was Ramchand who brought about the reconciliation between Mr. Biswas and the Tulsis; or
rather, since the Tulsis had few thoughts on the subject, made it possible for Mr. Biswas to recover
his family without indignity. Ramchand’s task was easy. Mr. Biswas’s name appeared almost every
day in the Sentinel , so that it seemed he had suddenly become famous and rich. Mr. Biswas,
believing himself that this was very nearly so, felt disposed to be charitable.
He was at that time touring the island as the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the hope of having people
come up to him and say, “You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.” Every day
his photograph appeared in the Sentinel together with his report on the previous day’s journey and
his itinerary for the day. The photograph was half a column wide and there was no room for his
ears; he was frowning, in an unsuccessful attempt to look menacing; his mouth was slightly open
and he stared at the camera out of the corners of his eyes, which were shadowed by the low-pulled
brim of his hat. As a circulation raiser the Scarlet Pimpernel was a failure. The photograph
concealed too much; and he was too well dressed for ordinary people to accost him in a sentence of
such length and correctness. The prizes went unclaimed for days and the Scarlet Pimpernel reports
became increasingly fantastic. Mr. Biswas visited his brother Prasad and readers of the Sentinel
learned next morning that a peasant in a remote village had rushed up to the Scarlet Pimpernel and
said, “You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.” The peasant was then reported
as saying that he read the Sentinel every day, since no other paper presented the news so fully, so
amusingly, and with such balance.
Then Mr. Biswas visited his eldest brother Pratap. And there he had a surprise. He found that
his mother had been living with Pratap for some weeks. For long Mr. Biswas had considered Bipti
useless, depressing and obstinate; he wondered how Pratap had managed to communicate with her
and persuade her to leave the hut in the back trace at Pagotes. But she had come and she had
changed. She was active and lucid; she was a lively and important part of Pratap’s household. Mr.
Biswas felt reproached and anxious. His luck had been too sudden, his purchase on the world too
slight. When he got back late that evening to the Sentinel office he sat down at a desk, his own (his
towel in the bottom drawer), and with memories coming from he knew not where, he wrote:
Scarlet Pimpernel Spends Night in a Tree
Anguish of Six-Hour Vigil
Oink! Oink!
The frogs croaked all around me. Nothing but that and the sound of the rain on trees in the
black night.
I was dripping wet. My motorcycle had broken down miles from anywhere. It was midnight
and I was alone.
The report then described a sleepless night, encounters with snakes and bats, the two cars that
passed in the night, heedless of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s cries, the rescue early in the morning by
peasants who recognized the Scarlet Pimpernel and claimed their prize.
It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas went to Arwacas. He got there in the middle of the
morning but did not go to Hanuman House until after four, when he knew the store would be
closed, the children back from school and the sisters in the hall and kitchen. His return was as
magnificent as he had wished. He was still climbing up the steps from the courtyard when he was
greeted by shouts, scampering and laughter.
“You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize!”
He went around, dropping Sentinel dollar-tokens into eager hands.
“Send this in with the coupon from the Sentinel . Your money will come the day after
tomorrow.”
Savi and Anand at once took possession of him.
Shama, emerging from the black kitchen, said, “Anand, you will get your father’s suit dirty.”
It was as though he had never left. Neither Shama nor the children nor the hall carried any
mark of his absence.
Shama dusted a bench at the table and asked whether he had eaten. He didn’t reply, but sat
where she had dusted. The children asked questions continually, and it was easy not to pay attention
to Shama as she brought the food out.
“Uncle Mohun, Uncle Mohun. You really spend a night up a tree?”
“What do you think, Jai?”
“Ma say you make it up. And I don’t see how you could climb up a tree.”
“I can’t tell you how often I fall down.”
It was better than he had imagined to be back in the sooty green hall with the shelflike loft,
the long pitchpine table, the unrelated pieces of furniture, the photographs of Pundit Tulsi, the
kitchen safe with the Japanese coffee-set.
“Uncle Mohun, that man did really chase you with a cutlass when you try to give a coupon to
his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Why you didn’t give him one too?”
“Go away. You children getting too smart for me.”
He ate and washed his hands and gargled. Shama urged him to be careful of his tie and jacket:
as though they were not new to her, as though she had a wifely interest even in clothes she had not
known from the start.
He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the
holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame
or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s
solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr. Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet
domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.
He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the
Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with
traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His
hair was long on his big head; he was in his “home-clothes”. Mr. Biswas held Anand to his leg and
Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had
little to talk about.
“Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?” Mr. Biswas asked.
Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.
“Who see it first?”
Anand shook his head.
“And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see
that ?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.”
“Who is the pretty baby? Tell me, who is the pretty baby?”
It was Sharna, corning into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.
Mr. Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.
Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. “Who is that man?” she said to the baby. “Do
you know that man?”
Mr. Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as
by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.
“And who is this?” Shama had taken the baby to Anand. “This is brother.” Anand tickled her
chin and the baby gurgled.
“Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a pretty baby?”
He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.
He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.
“Her name is Kamla,” Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.
“Nice name,” he said in English. “Who give it?”
“The pundit.”
“This one register too, I suppose?”
“But you were here when she was born–” And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on
to dangerous ground.
Mr. Biswas took the baby.
“Give her back to me,” Shama said after a short time. “She might get your clothes dirty.”
The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr. Biswas feel he had won a
victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs. Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that
he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t
he? Mr. Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good
health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected
much from Mr. Biswas and always had; which was why she had been so ready to agree when he
came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.
Mrs. Tulsi proposed that Mr. Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with
her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr. Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she
was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have
the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay
eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other
two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old
to do it herself.
The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune,
which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked
about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs. Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with
solemn sympathy.
They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light,
cooling the air. Mr. Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not
yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was
solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete
walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted
elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now
noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were
no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as
it was meant to.
The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street.
The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still
a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when
the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet
by fifty; and a sewerage trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating
back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space
at the sides, space for a garden at the front.
Could this luck have been more complete?
Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr. Biswas’s presence enforced
on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too,
that Mr. Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One
unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining
the dozens of strange women who, to Mr. Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days
before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean
and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went
with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been
sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr. Biswas’s sister, not even Mr. Biswas, to whom
she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.
Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little
impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a
bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table.
The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put
out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house
remained furnished in the manner which Mrs. Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the
drawing-room four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped
three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the
diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs. Tulsi had brought
none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled with potted
plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.
Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for
some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with
Mrs. Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs.
Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock
Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the
younger god said, “They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The
best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca
Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not homemade.”
To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation.
Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta
after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it “skipped”; and to hasten
the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the
icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.
And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of
Spain.
On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the
city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops
reflected only those opposite, Mr. Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with
a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city
could be known; it held no threat. They looked at caf after caf , rejecting, at Anand’s insistence,
all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which
was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the
icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had
to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory
delight after another.
“It don’t taste like icecream at all,” Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a
perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.
When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, “It is like horse pee.” Which was what some cousin
had said of a drink at Hanuman House.
“Anand!” Mr. Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. “You’ve got to stop talking
like that. You are in Port of Spain now.”
The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain
were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet,
sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the
empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters
whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of
taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of
the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a
square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back
verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel . The
promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.
With Mrs. Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at
times for Mr. Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a
strain. Mrs. Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into
her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor
possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr. Biswas became less cautious and formal as
his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr. Biswas’s work and Mr. Biswas, flattered to
be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big
books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and
Mr. Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape
and brothel-keeping.
Mr. Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs. Tulsi gave to her younger son.
Mrs. Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who
exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the
Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk botdes with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got
from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered
milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.
Though with Owad and Mrs. Tulsi Mr. Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently
deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on
Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.
His household established, Mr. Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.
“Savi!”
No answer.
“Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?”
“But I come.”
“Is not enough. You must come and answer.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“All right, Pa.”
“Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook.
Hand them to me.”
“O God ! That is all you call me for?”
“Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down
in shorthand.”
Savi ran out of the room.
“Anand! Anand!”
“Yes, Pa.”
“That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.”
Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.
“You reading too fast.”
“I thought you was writing shorthand.”
“You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at
Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.”
“O God !” And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.
But the checking went on.
Then Mr. Biswas said, “Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want
you to help me.”
He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it
at the end of these sessions as a consolation.
It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call
constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to
be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew
into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.
“Savi,” Shama would say, “go and wake your father.”
“Let Anand go.”
“No, the both of you go.”
To Shama, who began to complain of his “strictness”–a word which gave him a curious
satisfaction–he said, “It is not strictness. It is training.”
Mrs. Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit
Tulsi had submitted his children.
And whenever Mrs. Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint
like Mrs. Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi
and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, “God will bless you,” with such feeling that they
considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of
Savi and Anand to walk on Mr. Biswas as well.
Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr. Biswas wrote. Mr.
Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that
the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious,
futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back
verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages
of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.
“Your little daily puja , eh?” Mr. Biswas said.
“No,” she said. “I only trying to give you a raise.”
Mr. Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr.
Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr. Burnett didn’t believe in
paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr. Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty
dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were
complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to
make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other
week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back
verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable
little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama
wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr. Biswas came on a note that said,
“Old Creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.”
“I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,” he said.
She said, “I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic.”
And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, “Go
to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic.”
“Know more than you anyway,” he said. “Savi, ought twos are how much?”
“Two.”
“You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?”
“One.”
“But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.”
He found fault with all the textbooks.
“Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our
Animal Friends.” He read in a mincing voice:” ‘What should we do without our animal friends?
The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.’ You hear the
savage? And listen. ‘Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the
morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.’ Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well,
you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head
with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader .
Nesfield’s Grammar !” he exclaimed. “I used to use Macdougall’s.” And he sent Anand hunting for
the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.
From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up
as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to
abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was
exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her
sisters with pride, “The children are afraid of him.”
And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word
“Sunday” with the word “school” suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and
Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with
catchy tunes.
At home one day Anand began singing, “Jesus loves me, yes I know.”
Mrs. Tulsi was offended. “How do you know that Jesus loves you?”
“‘Cause the Bible tells me so,” Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.
Mrs. Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr. Biswas was resuming his religious
war.
“Roman cat, your mother,” he told Shama. “I thought a good Christian hymn would remind
her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.”
But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain
Cutteridge, Mr. Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a
disappointment.
“I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.”
Unmoved by Mr. Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to
wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to
her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs. Tulsi’s
tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on “old creole woman
from 42”. It amused Mr. Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama’s placid
handwriting, and he said, “I don’t see how that could frighten anybody.”
Shama conducted her exciting operations without any sense that they were exciting. She was
unwilling to risk serving notices personally. So late at night, when the tenant was almost certain to
be in bed, Shama went out with her notice and pot of glue and pasted the notice on the two leaves of
the door, so that the tenant, opening his door in the morning, would tear the notice and would not be
able to claim that it had not been served.
Mr. Biswas learned shorthand, though of a purely personal sort. He read all the books he
could get on journalism, and in his enthusiasm bought an expensive American volume called
Newspaper Management , which turned out to be an exhortation to newspaper proprietors to invest
in modern machinery. He discovered, and became addicted to, the extensive literature aimed at
people who want to become writers; again and again he read how manuscripts were to be presented
and was warned not to ring up the busy editors of London or New York newspapers. He bought
Short Stories : How to Write Them by Cecil Hunt and How to Write a Book , by the same author.
His salary being increased about this time, he ignored Shama’s pleas and bought a
secondhand portable typewriter on credit. Then, to make the typewriter pay for itself, he decided to
write for English and American periodicals. But he could find nothing to write about. The books he
had read didn’t help him. And then he saw an advertisement for the Ideal School of Journalism,
Edgware Road, London, he filled in and cut out the coupon for the free booklet. The booklet came
after two months. Printed sheets of various colours fell from it: initialled testimonials from all over
the world. The booklet said that the Ideal School not only taught but also marketed; and it wondered
whether Mr. Biswas might not find it worth his while to take a course in short story writing as well.
The principal of the Ideal School (a bespectacled grandfatherly man, from the spotty photograph)
had discovered the secret of every plot in the world and his discovery had been accepted by the
British Museum in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Mr. Biswas was impressed but
couldn’t spare the money. There had already been a row with Shama when he had used up the
salary increase for a further three months to pay for the first two journalism lessons. In due course
the first lesson came.
“Even people with outstanding writing ability say they cannot find subjects. But in reality
nothing is easier. You are sitting at your desk.” (Mr. Biswas read this in bed.) “You look through
your window. But wait. There is an article in that window. The various types of window, the history
of the window, windows famous in history, houses without windows. And the story of glass itself
can be fascinating. Already, then, you have subjects for two articles. You look through your
window and you see the sky. The weather is always a subject of conversation and there is no reason
why you cannot make it the subject of a lively article. The demand for such material is enormous.
For your first exercise, then, I want you to write four bright articles on the seasons. You may
incorporate as many of these hints as you wish:
“Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap of fish on the
fishmonger’s slab…”
“Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,” Mr. Biswas said. “The only fish I see is the fish that
does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.”
“… the tradesmen’s blinds, the crack of bat on ball on the village green, the lengthening
shadows
Mr. Biswas wrote the article on summer; and with the help of the hints, wrote other articles on
spring, winter and autumn.
“Autumn is with us again!” ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’ as the celebrated poet
John Keats puts it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter. We have gathered in the corn
which soon, before a blazing fire in the depths of winter, we shall enjoy, roasted or boiled on the
cob…”
He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were
being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself
to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstitions, The
Romance of Place-Names (“Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information”),
Characters at the Local.
He was stumped. No hints were given for these exercises and he wrote nothing. He didn’t tell
Shama. Not long after he received a heavy envelope from England. It contained his articles on the
seasons which he had typed out neatly on Sentinel paper and in the manner prescribed by the Ideal
School. A printed letter was attached.
“We regret to inform you that your articles have been submitted without success to: Evening
Standard , Evening News , The Times , The Tatler , London Opinion , Geographical Magazine , The
Field , Country Life . At least two editors spoke highly of the work but were forced to reject it
through lack of space. We ourselves feel that work of such quality should not be consigned to
oblivion. Why not try your local newspaper? That could very well be the beginning of a regular
Nature column. Editors are always looking for new ideas, new material, new writers. At any rate let
us know what happens. We at the Ideal like to hear of our pupils’ successes. In the meantime
continue with your exercises.”
“Continue with your exercises!” Mr. Biswas said. He thankfully abandoned Guy Fawkes and
Characters at the Local, and ignored the expostulations which reached him at regular intervals for
the next two years from the Edgware Road.
The typewriter became idle.
“It pay for itself,” Shama said. “No wonder it now have to rest.”
But soon the machine drew him again; and often, while Shama moved heavily about the back
verandah and kitchen, Mr. Biswas sat before the typewriter on the green table, inserted a sheet of
Sentinel paper, typed his name and address at the top righthand corner, as the Ideal School and all
the books had recommended, and wrote:
Escape
by M. Biswas
At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…
Here he often stopped. Sometimes he went on to the end of the page; sometimes, but rarely,
he typed frenziedly for page after page. Sometimes his hero had a Hindi name; then he was short
and unattractive and poor, and surrounded by ugliness, which was anatomized in bitter detail.
Sometimes his hero had a Western name; he was then faceless, but tall and broad-shouldered; he
was a reporter and moved in a world derived from the novels Mr. Biswas had read and the films he
had seen. None of these stories was finished, and their theme was always the same. The hero,
trapped into marriage, burdened with a family, his youth gone, meets a young girl. She is slim,
almost thin, and dressed in white. She is fresh, tender, unkissed; and she is unable to bear children.
Beyond the meeting the stories never went.
Sometimes these stories were inspired by an unknown girl in the advertising department of
the Sentinel . She often remained unknown. Sometimes Mr. Biswas spoke; but whenever the girl
accepted his invitation–to lunch, a film, the beach–his passion at once died; he withdrew the
invitation and avoided the girl; thus in time creating a legend among the girls of the advertising
department, all of whom knew, though he did not suspect, for he kept it as a heavy, shameful secret,
that at the age of thirty-three Mohun Biswas was already the father of four children.
Still, at the typewriter, he wrote of his untouched barren heroines. He began these stories with
joy; they left him dissatisfied and feeling unclean. Then he went to his room, called for Anand, and
to Anand’s disgust tried to play with him as with a baby, saying, “Shompo! Gomp!”
Forgetting that in his strictness, and as part of her training, he had ordered Shama to file all
his papers, he thought that these stories were as secret at home as his marriage and four children
were at the office. And one Friday, when he found Shama puzzling over her accounts and had
scoffed as usual, she said, “Leave me alone, Mr. John Lubbard.”
That was one of the names of his thirty-three-year-old hero.
“Go and take Sybil to the pictures.”
That was from another story. He had got the name from a novel by Warwick Deeping.
“Leave Ratni alone.”
That was the Hindi name he had given to the mother of four in another story. Ratni walked
heavily, “as though perpetually pregnant”; her arms filled the sleeves of her bodice and seemed
about to burst them; she sucked in her breath through her teeth while she worked at her accounts,
the only reading and writing she did.
Mr. Biswas recalled with horror and shame the descriptions of the small tender breasts of his
barren heroines.
Shama sucked her teeth loudly.
If she had laughed he would have hit her. But she never looked at him, only at her account
books.
He ran to his room, undressed, got his own cigarettes and matches, took down Marcus
Aurelius and Epictetus, and got into bed.
It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas, painting the kitchen safe and the green table with a
tin of yellow paint, yielded to an impulse and painted the typewriter-case and parts of the typewriter
as well.
For long the typewriter remained unused, until Anand and Savi began learning to type on it.
But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and
wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: At the age of thirty-three , when he
was already the father of four children…
So used to thinking of the house as his own, and in his new confidence, he made a garden. He
planted rose-bushes at the side of the house, and at the front dug a pond for water-lilies, which
spread prodigiously. He acquired more possessions, the most massive of which was a combined
bookcase and desk, of such weight and sturdiness that three men were required to put it into place in
his bedroom, where it stayed until they all moved from Port of Spain to Shorthills. Mice nested in
the bookcase, protected and nourished by the mass of paper with which the bookcase was stuffed:
newspapers (Mr. Biswas insisted that all the newspapers for a month should be kept, and there were
quarrels when a particular issue could not be found); every typewritten letter Mr. Biswas had
received, from the Sentinel , the Ideal School, people anxious or grateful for publicity; the rejected
articles on the seasons, the unfinished Escape stories (at first shamefully glanced at, though later
Mr. Biswas read them and regretted he had not taken up short story writing seriously).
Encouraged by Shama, he took an increasing interest in his personal appearance. In his silk
suit and tie he had never ceased to surprise her by his elegance and respectability; and whenever she
bought him anything, a shirt, cufflinks, a tiepin, he said, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you,
girl! One of these days.” Sometimes, while he was dressing, he would make an inventory of all the
things he was wearing and think, with wonder, that he was then worth one hundred and fifty dollars.
Once on the bicycle, he was worth about one hundred and eighty. And so he rode to his reporter’s
job and its curious status: welcomed, even fawned upon, by the greatest in the land, fed as well as
anybody and sometimes even better, yet always, finally, rejected.
“A hell of a thing today,” he told Shama. “As we were leaving Government House H.E. asked
me, ‘Which is your car?’ I don’t know. I suppose reporters in England must be rich like hell.”
But Shama was impressed. At Hanuman House she started dropping names, and Padma,
Seth’s wife, traced a tenuous and intricate family relationship between Seth and the man who had
driven the Prince of Wales during his visit to Trinidad.
On herself Shama spent little. Unable to buy the best and, like all the Tulsi sisters, having
only contempt for the second-rate in cloth and jewellery, she bought nothing at all and made do
with the gifts of cloth she received every Christmas from Mrs. Tulsi. Her bodices became patched
on the breasts and under the arms; and the more Mr. Biswas complained the more she patched. But
though her indifference to clothes seemed at times almost like inverted pride, she did not wholly
lose her concern for appearances. At Hanuman House a wedding invitation to Mrs. Tulsi was meant
for her daughters as well; and one large gift, invariably part of the Tulsi Store stock, went from the
House. But now Shama got invitations in her own right and during the Hindu wedding season she
borrowed deeply from the rent money, committing herself to almost inextricable entanglement with
her accounts, to buy presents, usually water-sets.
“Forget it this time,” Mr. Biswas said. “They must be so used by now to seeing you with a
water-set in your hand that I am sure they would believe that you did carry one.”
“I know what I am doing,” Shama said. “My children are going to be married one day too.”
“And when they give back all the water-sets poor Savi wouldn’t be able to walk, for all the
glasses and jugs. If they remember, that is. At least leave it for a few more years.”
But weddings and funerals had become important to Shama. From weddings she returned
tired, heavy-lidded and hoarse after the night-long singing, to find a house in confusion: Savi in
tears, the kitchen in disorder, Mr. Biswas complaining about his indigestion. Pleased at the
wedding, the gift that did not disgrace her, the singing, the return home, Shama would say, “Well,
as the saying goes, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.”
And for the following day or two, when she held Mr. Biswas and the children absolutely in
her power, she would be very gloomy; and it was at these times that she said, “I tell you, if it wasn’t
for the children–”
And Mr. Biswas would sing, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!”
As important as weddings and funerals were to Shama, holiday visits became to the children.
They went first of all to Hanuman House. But with every succeeding visit they felt more like
strangers. Alliances were harder to take up again. There were new jokes, new games, new stories,
new subjects of conversation. Too much had to be explained, and Anand and Savi and Myna often
ended by remaining together. As soon as they went back to Port of Spain this unity disappeared.
Savi returned to bullying Myna; Anand defended Myna; Savi beat Anand; Anand hit back; and Savi
complained.
“What!” Mr. Biswas said. “Hitting your sister! Shama, you see the sort of effect one little trip
to the monkey house does have on your children?”
It was a two-fold attack, for the children preferred visiting Mr. Biswas’s relations. These
relations had come as a revelation. Not only were they an untapped source of generosity; Savi and
Anand had also felt up to then that Mr. Biswas, like all the fathers at Hanuman House, had come
from nothing, and the only people who had a proper family were the Tulsis. It was pleasant and
novel, too, for Savi and Anand and Myna to find themselves flattered and cajoled and bribed. At
Hanuman House they were three children among many; at Ajodha’s there were no other children.
And Ajodha was rich, as they could tell by the house he was building. He offered them money and
was absurdly delighted that they should know its value sufficiently well to take it. Anand got an
extra six cents for reading That Body of Yours ; it would have been worth it for the praise alone.
They were feted at Pratap’s; Bipti was embarrassingly devoted and their cousins were shy and
admiring and kind. At Prasad’s they were again the only children and lived in a mud hut, which
they thought quaint: it was like a large doll’s house. Prasad didn’t give money, but a thick red
exercise book, a Shirley Temple fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman’s ink. And so, with this
encouragement to milk and prunes, the profitable round of holiday visits ended.
Then came the news that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to send Owad abroad to study, to become a
doctor.
Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed. More and more students were going abroad; but they were
items of news, remote. He had never thought that anyone so close to him could escape so easily.
Concealing his sadness and envy, he made a show of enthusiasm and offered advice about shipping
lines. And at Arwacas some of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers defected. Forgetting that they were in
Trinidad, that they had crossed the black water from India and had thereby lost all caste, they said
they could have nothing more to do with a woman who was proposing to send her son across the
black water.
“Water on a duck’s back,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “The number of times that mother of
yours has made herself outcast!”
There was talk about the suitability and adequacy of the food Owad would get in England.
“Every morning in England, you know,” Mr. Biswas said, “the scavengers go around picking
up the corpses. And you know why? The food there is not cooked by orthodox Roman Catholic
Hindus.”
“Suppose Uncle Owad want more,” Anand said. “You think they will give it to him?”
“Hear the boy,” Mr. Biswas said, squeezing Anand’s thin arms. “Let me tell you, eh, boy, that
you and Savi come out of the monkey house as going concerns only because of the little Ovaltine
you drink.”
“No wonder the others can hold Anand and beat his little tail,” Shama said.
“Your family are tough ,” Mr. Biswas said. He spat the word out and made it an insult.
“Tough ,” he repeated.
“Well, I could say one thing. None of us have calves swinging like hammocks.”
“Of course not. Your calves are tough . Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The
sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some
of your mother’s bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself
hairy like a monkey.”
Then, after a trip to Hanuman House, Shama reported that the decision to send Owad abroad
had reduced Shekhar, the elder god, married man though he was, to tears.
“Send him some rope and soft candle,” Mr. Biswas said.
“He never did want to get married,” Shama said.
“Never did want to get married! Never see anybody skip off so smart to check
mother-in-law’s money.”
“He wanted to go to Cambridge.”
“Cambridge !” Mr. Biswas exclaimed, startled by the word, starded to hear it coming so
easily from Shama. “Cambridge, eh? Well, why the hell he didn’t go? Why the hell the whole pack
of you didn’t go to Cambridge? Frighten of the bad food?”
“Seth was against it.” Shama’s tone was injured and conspiratorial.
Mr. Biswas paused. “Well, you don’t say. You don’t say!”
“I glad it please somebody.”
She could give no more information, and at last said impatiently, “You getting like a woman.”
She clearly felt that an injustice had been done. And he knew the Tulsis too well to be
surprised that the sisters, who never questioned their own neglected education, cat-in-bag marriage
and precarious position, should yet feel concerned that Shekhar, whose marriage was happy and
whose business was nourishing, had not had all that he might.
Shekhar was coming to spend a week-end in Port of Spain. His family would not be with him
and old Mrs. Tulsi would be in Arwacas: the brothers were to be boys together for one last
week-end. Mr. Biswas waited for Shekhar with interest. He came early on Friday evening. The taxi
hooted; Shama switched on the lights in the verandah and the porch; Shekhar ran up the front steps
in his white linen suit and breezed through the house on his leather-heeled shoes, charging it with
excitement, depositing on the diningtable a bottle of wine, a tin of peanuts, a packet of biscuits, two
copies of Life and a paper-backed volume of Halevy’s History of the English People . Shama
greeted him with sadness, Mr. Biswas with a solemnity which he hoped could be mistaken for
sympathy. Shekhar responded with geniality: the absent geniality of the businessman sparing time
from his business, the family man away from his family.
Owad’s expensive new suitcases were in the back verandah and Mr. Biswas was painting
Owad’s name on them.
“Sort of thing to make you feel you want to go away,” Mr. Biswas said.
Shekhar wasn’t drawn. After the wine and peanuts and biscuits had been shared he showed
himself almost paternally preoccupied with the arrangements for Owad’s journey, and in spite of
Mr. Biswas’s coaxings never once mentioned Cambridge.
“You and your mouth,” Mr. Biswas told Shama.
She had no time for argument. She felt honoured at having to entertain her two brothers at
once, on such an important occasion, and was determined to do it well. She had prepared all week
for the week-end, and shortly after breakfast that morning had begun to cook.
From time to time Mr. Biswas went into the kitchen and whispered, “Who paying for all this?
The old she-fox or you? Not me, you hear. Nobody sending me to Cambridge. Next week, when I
eating dry ice, nobody sending me food by parcel post from Hanuman House, you hear.”
It was a Hanuman House festival in miniature, and to the children almost like a game of
makebelieve. They had the freedom of the kitchen and nibbled and tasted whenever they could.
Shekhar bought sweets for them and on Sunday sent them to the one-thirty children’s show at the
Roxy. And Mr. Biswas got on so well with the brothers that he was invaded by the holiday feeling
that they were all men together, and he thought himself privileged to be host to the two sons of the
family, one of whom was going abroad to become a doctor. He attempted genuinely to contribute to
the enthusiasm, talking again about shipping lines and ships as though he had travelled in them all;
he hinted at the write-up he was going to give Owad and flattered him by asking him to refuse to
see reporters from the other newspapers; he spoke deprecatingly about Anand’s achievements and
obtained compliments from Shekhar.
Sunday brought the Sunday Sentinel and Mr. Biswas’s scandalous feature, “I Am Trinidad’s
Most Evil Man”, one of a series of interviews with Trinidad’s richest, poorest, tallest, fattest,
thinnest, fastest, strongest men; which was following a series on men with unusual callings: thief,
beggar, night-soil remover, mosquito-killer, undertaker, birth-certificate searcher, lunatic-asylum
warden; which had followed a series on one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed men; which had come
about when, after an M. Biswas interview with a man who had been shot years before in the neck
and had to cover up the hole in order to speak, the Sentinel office had been crowded with men with
interesting mutilations, offering to sell their story.
Mr. Biswas’s article was hilariously received by Owad and Shekhar, particularly as the most
evil man was a wellknown Arwacas character. He had committed one murder under great
provocation and after his acquittal had developed into a genial bore. The title of the interview
promised for the following week, with Trinidad’s maddest man, aroused further laughter.
After breakfast all the men–and this included Anand–went for a bathe at the harbour
extension at Docksite. The dredging was incomplete, but the sea-wall had been built and in the early
morning parts of the sea provided safe, clean bathing, though at every footstep the mud rose,
clouding the water. The reclaimed land, raised to the level of the sea-wall, was not as yet real land,
only crusted mud, sharp along the cracks which patterned it like a coral fan.
The sun was not out and the high, stationary clouds were touched with red. Ships were blurred
in the distance; the level sea was like dark glass. Anand was left at the edge of the water, near the
wall, and the men went ahead, their voices and splashings carrying far in the stillness. All at once
the sun came out, the water blazed, and sounds were subdued.
Aware of his unimpressive physique, Mr. Biswas began to clown; and, as he did more and
more now, he tried to extend his clowning to Anand.
“Duck, boy!” he called. “Duck and let us see how long you can stay under water.”
“No!” Anand shouted back.
This abrupt denial of his father’s authority had become part of the clowning.
“You hear the boy?” Mr. Biswas said to Owad and Shekhar. He spoke an obscene Hindi
epigram which had always amused them and which they now associated with him.
“You know what I feel like doing?” he said a little later. “See that rowingboat there, by the
wall? Let us untie it. By tomorrow morning it will be in Venezuela.”
“And let us throw you in it,” Shekhar said.
They chased Mr. Biswas, caught him, held him above the water while he laughed and
squirmed, his calves swinging like hammocks.
“One,” they counted, swinging him. “Two–”
Suddenly he became affronted and angry.
“Three!”
The smooth water slapped his belly and chest and forehead like something hard and hot.
Surfacing, his back to them, he took some time to rearrange his hair, in reality wiping away the
tears that had come to his eyes. The pause was long enough to tell Owad and Shekhar that he was
angry. They were embarrassed; and he was recognizing the unreasonableness of his anger when
Shekhar said, “Where is Anand?”
Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “The boy is all right. Ducking. His grandfather was a champion
diver.”
Owad laughed.
“Ducking, hell!” Shekhar said, and began swimming towards the wall.
There was no sign of Anand. In the shadow of the wall the rowingboat barely rocked above its
reflection.
Silently Mr. Biswas and Owad watched Shekhar. He dived. Mr. Biswas scooped up a handful
of water and let it fall on his head. Some of it ran down his face; some of it sprinkled the sea.
Shekhar reappeared near the sea-wall, shook the water from his head and dived again.
Mr. Biswas began to wade towards the wall. Owad began to swim. Mr. Biswas began to
swim.
Shekhar surfaced again, near the rowingboat. There was alarm on his face. He was holding
Anand under his left arm and was pulling strongly with his right.
Owad and Mr. Biswas moved towards him. He shouted to them to keep away. All at once he
stopped pulling with his right hand, stood up, and was only waist-high in water. Behind him, in
shadow, the rowingboat barely moved.
They carried Anand to the top of the wall and rolled him. Then Shekhar did some kneading
exercises on his thin back. Mr. Biswas stood by, noticing only the large safetypin–one of Shama’s,
doubtless–on Anand’s blue striped shirt, which lay in the small heap of his clothes.
Anand spluttered. His expression was one of anger. He said, “I was walking to the boat.”
“I told you to stay where you were,” Mr. Biswas said, angry too.
“And the bottom of the sea drop away.”
“The dredging,” Shekhar said. He had not lost his look of alarm.
“The sea just drop away,” Anand cried, lying on his back, covering his face with a crooked
arm. He spoke as one insulted.
Owad said, “Anyway, you’ve got the record for ducking, Shompo.”
“Shut up!” Anand screamed. He began to cry, rubbing his legs on the hard, cracked ground,
then turning over on his belly.
Mr. Biswas took up the shirt with the safetypin and handed it to Anand.
Anand snatched the shirt and said, “Leave me.”
“We shoulda leave you,” Mr. Biswas said, “when you was there, ducking.” As soon as he
spoke the last word he regretted it.
“Yes!” Anand screamed. “You shoulda leave me.” He got up and, going to his heap of
clothes, began to dress furiously, forcing his clothes over his wet and gritty skin. “I am never going
to come out with any of you again.” His eyes were small and red, the lids swollen.
He walked away from them, quickly, his small body silhouetted against the sun, across the
weed-ridden mud flat. Unused, his towel remained rolled, a large bundle below his arm.
“Well,” Mr. Biswas said. “Back for a little duck?”
Owad and Shekhar smiled. Then, slowly, they all dressed.
“I never thought the day would come when I would be glad that I was a sea scout,” Shekhar
said. “It was just like a hole in the sea, you know. And there was a helluva pull. By tomorrow little
Anand would really have been in Venezuela.”
They found Shama anxious to know why Anand had been sent back. He had said nothing and
had locked himself in his room.
Savi and Myna burst into tears when they heard.
The lunch was the climax of the week-end festivities, but Anand did not come out of his
room. He ate only a slice of water melon which Savi took to him.
Later that afternoon, after Shekhar had left, Shama gave vent to her annoyance. Anand had
spoiled the week-end for everybody and she was going to flog him. She was dissuaded only by
Owad’s pleas.
“My children! My children!” Shama said. “Well, the example set. They just following.”
The next day Mr. Biswas wrote an angry article about the lack of warning notices at Docksite.
In the afternoon Anand came home from school a little more composed and, extraordinarily,
without being asked, took out a copy book from his bag and handed it to Mr. Biswas, who was in
the hammock in the back verandah. Then Anand went to change.
The copy book contained Anand’s English compositions, which reflected the vocabulary and
ideals of Anand’s teacher as well as Anand’s obsession with the stylistic device of the noun
followed by a dash, an adjective and the noun again: for example, “the robbers–the ruthless
robbers”.
The last composition was headed “A Day by the Seaside”. Below that the phrases supplied by
the teacher had been copied down: project a visit–feverish preparations–eager anticipation–laden
hampers–wind blowing through open car–spirits overflowing into song–graceful curve of coconut
trees–arc of golden sand–crystalline water–pounding surf–majestic rollers–energetically battling the
waves–cries of delirious joy–grateful shade of coconut trees–glorious sunset–sad to leave–memory
to be cherished in future days–looking forward in eager anticipation to paying a return visit.
Mr. Biswas was familiar with the clarity and optimism of the teacher’s vision, and he
expected Anand to write: “With anticipation–eager anticipation–we projected a visit to the seaside
and we made preparations–feverish preparations–and then on the appointed morning we struggled
with hampers–laden hampers–into the motorcar.” For in these compositions Anand and his fellows
knew nothing but luxury.
But in this last composition there were no dashes and repetitions; no hampers, no motorcar, no
golden arcs of sand; only a walk to Docksite, a concrete sea-wall and liners in the distance. Mr.
Biswas read on, anxious to share the pain of the previous day. “I raised my hand but I did not know
if it got to the top. I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it. I thought I was going to die
and I closed my eyes because I did not want to look at the water.” The composition ended with a
denunciation of the sea.
None of the teacher’s phrases had been used but the composition had been given twelve
marks out of ten.
Anand had come back to the verandah and was having his tea at the table.
Mr. Biswas wished to be close to him. He would have done anything to make up for the
solitude of the previous day. He said, “Come and sit down here and go through the composition
with me.”
Anand became impatient. He was pleased by the marks but was fed up with the composition
and even a little ashamed of it. He had been made to read it out to the class, and the confession that
he had not struggled with laden hampers into a car and driven to palm-fringed beaches but had
walked to common Docksite had caused some laughter. So had the sentences: “I opened my mouth
to cry for help. Water filled it.”
“Come,” Mr. Biswas said, making room in the hammock.
“No!” Anand shouted.
But there was no one to laugh.
Mr. Biswas’s hurt turned to anger. “Go and cut me a whip,” he said, getting out of the
hammock. “Go on. Quick sharp.”
Anand stamped down the back stairs. From the neem tree that grew at the edge of the lot and
hung over into the sewerage trace he cut a thick rod, far thicker than those he normally cut. His
purpose was to insult Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas recognized the insult and was further enraged. He
seized the rod and beat Anand savagely. In the end Shama had to intervene.
“I can’t stand this,” Savi cried. “I can’t stand you people. I am going back to Hanuman
House.”
Myna was crying as well.
Shama said to Anand, “You see what you cause?”
He said nothing.
“Good!” Savi said. “All this shouting and screaming make this house sound like every other
house in the street. I hope the low minds of some people are satisfied.”
“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said calmly. “Some people are satisfied.”
His smile drove Savi to fresh tears.
But Anand had his revenge that evening.
Now that there were only a few days left to Owad in Trinidad, and very few before the family
came to Port of Spain for the farewell, Mr. Biswas and Anand ate as many meals as possible with
him. They ate formally, in the diningroom. And that evening, just before Mr. Biswas sat at the table,
Anand pulled the chair from under him, and Mr. Biswas fell noisily to the floor.
“Shompo! Lompo! Gomp!” Owad said, roaring with laughter.
Savi said, “Well, some people are satisfied.”
Mr. Biswas didn’t talk during the meal. Afterwards he went for a walk. When he came back
he went directly to his room and never once called to anyone to get his cigarettes or matches or
books.
It was his habit to walk through the house at six in the morning, rustling the newspaper and
getting everyone up. Then he himself went back to bed: he had the gift of enjoying sleep in
snatches. He woke no one the next morning and didn’t show himself while the children were getting
ready for school.
But before Anand left, Shama gave him a six-cents piece.
“From your Father. For milk from the Dairies.”
At three that afternoon, when school was over, Anand walked down Victoria Avenue, past the
racketing wheels and straps of the Government Printery, crossed Tragarete Road for the shade of
the ivory-covered walls of Lapeyrouse Cemetery, and turned into Phillip Street where, in the
cigarette factory, was the source of the sweet smell of tobacco which hung over the district. The
Dairies looked expensive and forbidding in white and pale green. Anand tiptoed to the caged desk,
said to the woman, “A small bottle of milk, please,” paid, got his voucher, and sat on a tall pale
green stool at the milky-smelling bar. The white-capped barman tried to stab off the silver top a
little too nonchalantly and, failing twice, pressed it out with a large thumb. Anand didn’t care for
the ice-cold milk and the cloying sweetness it left at the back of his throat; it also seemed to have
the tobacco smell, which he associated with the cemetery.
When he got home Shama gave him a small brown paper parcel. It contained prunes. They
were his, to eat as and when he pleased.
Both he and Savi were told to keep the milk and the prunes secret, lest Owad should hear of it
and laugh at them for their presumptuousness.
And almost immediately Anand began to pay the price of the milk and prunes. Mr. Biswas
went to the school and saw the headmaster and the teacher whose vocabulary he knew so well. They
agreed that Anand could win an exhibition if he worked, and Mr. Biswas made arrangements for
Anand to be given private lessons after school, after milk. To balance this, Mr. Biswas also
arranged for Anand to have unlimited credit at the school shop; thus deranging Shama’s accounts
further.
Savi’s heart went out to Anand.
“I am too glad,” she said, “that God didn’t give me a brain.”
In the week before Owad’s departure the house filled up with sisters, husbands, children and
those of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers who remained faithful. The women came in their brightest clothes
and best jewellery and, though only twenty miles from their villages, looked exotic. Heedless of
stares, they stared; and made comments in Hindi, unusually loud, unusually ribald, because in the
city Hindi was a secret language, and they were in holiday mood. A tent covered the back of the
yard where Anand and Owad had sometimes played cricket. Fire-holes had been dug on the pitch
itself, and over these food was always being cooked in large black cauldrons specially brought from
Hanuman House. The visitors had come with musical instruments. They played and sang late into
the night, and neighbours, too fascinated to object, peeped through holes in the corrugated iron
fences.
Few of the visitors knew Mr. Biswas or knew the position he held in the house. And all at
once this position became uncertain. He found himself squeezed into one room, and for periods lost
track of Shama and his children. “Eight dollars,” he whispered to Shama. “That is the rent I pay
every month. I have my rights.”
The rose-bushes and the lily-pond suffered.
“Set up trip-wires,” he told Shama. “Then let them carry on. ‘Ar , what have we here?’ He
imitated an old woman talking Hindi. “Then, oops! Trip! Bam! Fall. All the pretty clothes get dirty
like hell. Face wet with mud. Let that happen a few times. Then they will learn that flowers don’t
just grow like that.”
After two days he gave up his flowers as lost. He went for long walks in the evening and
stayed out as late as possible, calling at various police stations on the chance of picking up a story.
One night he stayed out until the street dogs began their round, futile creatures that hunted in packs,
fled at the sound of a human foot and left a trail of overturned dustbins and sifted garbage. The
house was alive but subdued when he got back. He found four children on his bed. They were not
his. Thereafter he occupied his room early in the evening, bolted the door and refused to answer
knocks, calls, scratches and cries.
And all at once, too, the bond between Owad and himself seemed to have evaporated. Owad
was out for much of the time making farewell calls; when he came to the house he was immediately
besieged by friends and relations who gazed on him and wept and offered advice which they later
discussed among themselves, to prove their concern: advice about money, the weather, food,
alcohol, women.
The time came for photographs. Husbands, children and friends watched as Owad posed with
Shekhar, with Mrs. Tulsi, with Shekhar and Mrs. Tulsi, with Shekhar, Mrs. Tulsi and the whole
array of the sisters who, because the occasion was sad, ignored the pleas of the Chinese
photographer and scowled at the camera.
On the last day Seth arrived. He wore his khaki uniform; his bluchers rang on the floor; he
dominated, imposing formality wherever he went. His absence had been noted, and now everyone
was expectant. But after the final family council Owad, Shekhar, Mrs. Tulsi and Seth looked only
solemn, which could have been a sign of disagreement, or sorrow.
Mr. Biswas achieved a minor notoriety when he brought the Sentinel photographer to the
house, cleared the drawing-room and did his best to appear to be directing both Owad and the
photographer. But on the following morning the story, on page three–TRINIDAD MAN OFF TO
U.K. FOR MEDICAL STUDIES–was given little attention, for those who were not occupied with
dressing their children for the wharf or getting wharf passes were at the service Hari was conducting
in the tent.
Finally they went to the wharf. Only newborn babies and their mothers stayed behind. The
Tulsi contingent stared at the ship; and the ship’s rails were presently lined with in-transit
passengers and members of the ship’s company, getting an unusually exotic glimpse of Port of
Spain harbour. The word went around that well-wishers could go aboard and in a matter of minutes
the Tulsis and their friends had overrun the ship. They stared at officers and passengers and the
photographs of Adolf Hitler, and listened attentively to the guttural language around them, to mimic
it later. The older women kicked at decks and rails and the sides of the ship, testing its
seaworthiness. Some of the more susceptible took it in turns to sit on Owad’s bunk and weep. The
men were shyer, and more respectful before the might of the ship; they wandered about silently
with their hats in their hands. Whatever doubts remained about ship and crew vanished when an
officer began giving out presents: lighters to the men, dolls in country dress to the women. And all
the time, unnoticed by those he was seeking to impress, Mr. Biswas scurried knowingly about the
ship, talking to the foreigners and writing in his notebook.
They came out of the ship and massed formally in front of a magenta-coloured shed with
French and English notices forbidding smoking. From somewhere a chair had been obtained and
Mrs. Tulsi sat on it, her veil pulled low over her forehead, a handkerchief crushed in one hand, with
Sushila, the sickroom widow, at her side.
Owad started to kiss, strangers first. But they were too many; soon he abandoned them and
concentrated on the family. He kissed each sister into a spurt of tears; he shook the men by the
hand, and when it was Mr. Biswas’s turn he smiled and said, “No more ducking.”
Mr. Biswas was unaccountably moved. His legs shook; he felt unsteady. He said, “I hope war
doesn’t break out–” Tears rushed to his eyes, he choked and could say no more.
Owad had passed on. He embraced the children; then Shekhar; then Seth, who cried
copiously; and finally Mrs. Tulsi, who didn’t cry at all.
He went into the ship. Presently he appeared at the rails and waved. A passenger joined him;
they began to talk.
The passengers’ gangway was drawn up. Then there were shouts, raucous, unsustained
singing, and three Germans with bruised faces and torn and dirty clothes came staggering along the
wharf, comically supporting one another, drunk. Someone from the ship called to them harshly;
they shouted back and, drunk and collapsing though they were, and without touching the rope-rail,
they walked up the narrow gang-board at the stern. All the doubts about the ship were re-excited.
Whistles: waves from ship, from shore: the ship edging away: the dock less protected, the
dark, dirty water surfaced with litter. And soon they stood quite exposed in front of the customs
shed, staring at the ship, staring at the gap it had left.
The weakness that had come to him at the touch of Owad’s hands remained with Mr. Biswas.
There was a hole in his stomach. He wanted to climb mountains, to exhaust himself, to walk and
walk and never return to the house, to the empty tent, the dead fire-holes, the disarrayed furniture.
He left the wharves with Anand and they walked aimlessly through the city. They stopped at a caf
and Mr. Biswas bought Anand icecream in a tub and a Coca Cola.
The paper would sprawl on the sunny steps in the morning; there would be stillness at noon
and shadow in the afternoon. But it would be a different day.
2. The New Regime
Having no further business in Port of Spain, Mrs. Tulsi returned to Arwacas. The tent was
taken down and after a few days the house was cleared of stragglers. Mr. Biswas set about restoring
his rose-beds and the lily-pond, whose edges had collapsed, turning the water into bubbling mud.
He worked without heart, feeling the emptiness of the house and not knowing how much longer he
would be allowed to stay there. None of Mrs. Tulsi’s furniture had been removed: the house there
seemed to be awaiting change. Some of the savour went out of his job at the Sentinel . He needed to
address his work mentally to someone. At first this had been Mr. Burnett; then it had been Owad.
Now there was only Shama. She seldom read his articles; when he read them aloud to her she
showed neither interest nor amusement and made no comments. Once he gave her the typescript of
an article and she infuriated him by turning over the last page and looking for more. “No more, no
more,” he said. “I don’t want to strain you.”
And from Hanuman House came more reports of disturbance. Govind, the eager, the loyal,
was discontented; Shama reported his seditious sayings. Nothing had outwardly changed, but Mrs.
Tulsi no longer directed and her influence was beginning to be felt more and more as only that of a
cantankerous invalid. With her two sons settled, she appeared to have lost interest in the family. She
spent much of her time in the Rose Room, acquiring illnesses, grieving for Owad. As for Seth, he
still controlled; but his control was superficial. Though nothing had been said openly, Shekhar’s
reported displeasure, uncontradicted, lay against him and made him suspect to the sisters. When all
was said and done Seth was not of the family and he alone could not maintain its harmony, as had
been shown by his helplessness when squabbles had arisen between sisters during Mrs. Tulsi’s
absences in Port of Spain. Seth ruled effectively only in association with Mrs. Tulsi and through her
affection and trust. That trust, not officially withdrawn, was no longer so fully displayed; and Seth
was even beginning to be resented as an outsider.
Then came rumours that Seth had been inspecting properties.
“Buying it for Mai, you think?” Mr. Biswas asked.
Shama said, “I glad it make somebody happy.”
And Mr. Biswas was soon to regret his jubilation. The Christmas school holidays came and
Shama took the children to Hanuman House. By now they were complete strangers there. The old
crepe paper decorations and the goods in the dark, choked Tulsi Store were petty country things
after the displays in the Port of Spain shops, and Savi felt pity for the people of Arwacas, who had
to take them seriously. At last on Christmas Eve the store was closed and the uncles went away.
Savi, Anand, Myna and Kamla hunted for stockings and hung them up. And got nothing. There was
no one to complain to. Some of the sisters had secretly provided gifts for their children; and on
Christmas morning in the hall, where Mrs. Tulsi was not waiting to be kissed, the gifts were
displayed and compared. With Owad in England, Mrs. Tulsi in her room, all the uncles away, and
Shekhar spending the day with his wife’s family, there was no one to organize games, to give a lead
to the gaiety. And Christmas was reduced to lunch and Chinta’s icecream, as tasteless and
rust-rippled as ever. The sisters were sullen; the children quarrelled, and some were even flogged.
Shekhar came on the morning of Boxing Day with a large bag of imported sweets. He went
up to Mrs. Tulsi’s room, had lunch in the hall, and then went away again. When Mr. Biswas arrived
later that afternoon he found that the talk among the sisters was not of Seth, but of Shekhar and his
wife. The sisters felt that Shekhar had abandoned them. Yet no one blamed him. He was under the
influence of his wife, and the fault was wholly hers.
Relations between the sisters and Shekhar’s wife had never been easy. Despite the
untraditional organization of Hanuman House, where married daughters lived with their mother, the
sisters were alert to certain of the conventions of Hindu family relationships: mothers-in-law, for
example, were expected to be hard on daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law were to be despised. But
Shekhar’s wife had from the first met Tulsi patronage with arrogant Presbyterian modernity. She
flaunted her education. She called herself Dorothy, without shame or apology. She wore short
frocks and didn’t care that they made her look lewd and absurd: she was a big woman who had
grown fat after the birth of her first child, and her dresses hung from her high, shelflike hips as from
a hoop. Her voice was deep, her manner hearty; once, when she had damaged her ankle, she used a
stick, and Chinta remarked that it suited her. Added to all this she sometimes sold the tickets at her
cinema; which was disgraceful, besides being immoral. So far, however, from making any
impression on Dorothy, the sisters continually found themselves defeated. They had said she
wouldn’t be able to keep a house: she turned out to be maddeningly house-proud. They had said she
was barren: she was bearing a child every two years. Her children were all girls, but this was
scarcely a triumph for the sisters. Dorothy’s daughters were of exceptional beauty and the sisters
could complain only that the Hindi names Dorothy had chosen–Mira, Leela, Lena–were meant to
pass as Western ones.
And now old charges were made again and for the benefit of Shama and other attentive
visiting sisters fresh details added. As the talk scratched back and forth over the same topic these
details became increasingly gross: Dorothy, like all Christians, used her right hand for unclean
purposes, her sexual appetite was insatiable, her daughters already had the eyes of whores. Over and
over the sisters concluded that Shekhar was to be pitied, because he had not gone to Cambridge and
had instead been married against his will to a wife who was shameless. Padma, Seth’s wife, was
present, and Seth’s behaviour could not be discussed. Whenever Cambridge was mentioned looks
and intonation made it clear to Padma that she was excluded from this implied criticism of her
husband, that she, like Shekhar, was to be pitied for having such a spouse. And Mr. Biswas
marvelled again at the depth of Tulsi family feeling.
Mr. Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety
and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday
stateness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls,
with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned,
deprived of animation; and Mr. Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize
with the sisters.
Savi said, “This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.”
Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In
Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of
replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless
coloured couple. And at the Sentinel there were rumours.
Under Mr. Burnett’s direction the Sentinel had overtaken the Gazette and, though some
distance behind the Guardian , it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an
embarrassment to the owners. Mr. Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr. Biswas
knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the
staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr. Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the
office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been
misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr. Burnett became increasingly perverse. “Let’s face it,”
he said. “Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop
Hitler either.” The Guardian responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front
page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to
the end the Sentinel had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the
tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain
dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.
Early in the new year the blow fell. Mr. Biswas was lunching with Mr. Burnett in a Chinese
restaurant, in one of those cubicles weakly lit by a low-hanging naked bulb, with lengths of flex
loosely attached to the flyblown, grimy celotex partitions, when Mr. Burnett said, “Amazing scenes
are going to be witnessed soon. I’m leaving.” He paused. “Sacked.” As if divining Mr. Biswas’s
thoughts, he added, “Nothing for you to worry about, though.” Then, in quick succession, he
displayed a number of conflicting moods. He was gay; he was depressed; he was glad to leave; he
was sorry to go; he didn’t want to talk about it; he talked about it; he wasn’t going to talk any more
about himself; he talked about himself. He ate in spasms, attacking the food as though it had done
him some injury. “Shoots? Is that what they call this? There’ll be damned little bamboo left in
China at this rate.” He pressed the bell, which lay at the centre of a roughly circular patch of grime
on the wall. They heard it ring in some distant cavern, above a multitude of other bells, the pattering
of waitresses’ feet and talk in adjacent cubicles.
The harassed waitress came and Mr. Burnett said, “Shoots? This is just plain bamboo. What
do you think I have inside here?” He tapped his belly. “A paper factory?”
“That was one portion,” the waitress said.
“That was one bamboo.”
He ordered more lager and the waitress sucked her teeth and went out, leaving the swing door
swinging rapidly to and fro.
“One portion,” Mr. Burnett said. “They make it sound like hay. And this damned room is like
a stall. I’m not worried. I’ve got other strings to my bow. You too. You could go back to your
sign-writing. I leave, you leave. Let’s all leave.”
They laughed.
Mr. Biswas returned to the office in a state of great agitation. He had been associated, and
zestfully, with some of the most frivolous excesses of the Sentinel . Now at the thought of each he
felt a stab of guilt and panic. He was expecting to be summoned to mysterious rooms and told by
their secure occupants that his services were no longer required. He sat at his desk–but it belonged
to him no more than the columns of the Sentinel he filled–and listened to the noises made by the
carpenters. Those were the noises he had heard on his first day in the office; building and rebuilding
had gone on without interruption ever since. The newsroom came to its afternoon life. Reporters
arrived, took off their jackets, opened notebooks and typed; groups gathered at the green
water-cooler and broke up again; at some desks proofs were being corrected, the inner pages laid
out. For more than four years he had been part of this excitement. Now, waiting for the summons,
he could only observe it.
Getting to believe that by staying in the office he was increasing the risk of dismissal, he left
early and cycled home. Fear led to fear. Suppose he had to send the children back to Hanuman
House, would there be anyone to receive them? Suppose Mrs. Tulsi gave him notice–as Shama did
so often to the tenement people–where would he go? How would he live?
The years stretched ahead, dark.
When he got home he mixed and drank some Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, undressed,
got into bed and began to read Epictetus.
But the days went by and no summons came. And at last it was time for Mr. Burnett to leave.
Mr. Biswas wanted to make some gesture to show his gratitude and sympathy, but he could think of
nothing. And after all Mr. Burnett was escaping; he was staying behind. The Sentinel reported Mr.
Burnett’s departure on the society page. There was an unkind photograph of Mr. Burnett looking
uncomfortable in a dinner jacket, his small eyes popping in the flash of the camera, a cigar stuck in
his mouth as if for comic effect. He was reported as being sorry to leave; he had to take up an
appointment in America; he had learned much from his association with Trinidad and the Sentinel ,
and he would take a great interest in the progress of both; he thought the standards of local
journalism “surprisingly high”. It was left to the other newspapers to reveal the other strings to his
bow that Mr. Burnett had spoken about. They reported that an Indian troupe, made up of dancers, a
fire-walker, a snake-charmer and a man who could rest on a bed of nails, was accompanying Mr.
Burnett, a former editor of a local newspaper, on his travels to America. One headline was THE
CIRCUS MOVES ON.
And the new regime started at the Sentinel . The day after Mr. Burnett’s departure the
newsroom was hung with posters which said DON”T BE BRIGHT, JUST GET IT RIGHT and
NEWS NOT VIEWS and FACTS? IF NOT AXE and CHECK IT OR CHUCK IT. Mr. Biswas
regarded them all as aimed at himself alone, and their whimsicality scared him. The office was
subdued and everyone wore a look of earnestness, those who had gone up, those who had gone
down. Mr. Burnett’s news editor had been made a sub-editor. His bright reporters had been
variously scattered. One went to Today’s Arrangements, Invalids and The Weather, one to
Shipping, one to Diana’s Diary on the society page, one to Classified Advertisements. Mr. Biswas
joined Court Shorts.
“Write?” he said to Shama. “I don’t call that writing. Is more like filling up a form. X, aged so
much, was yesterday fined so much by Mr. Y at this court for doing that. The prosecution alleged.
Electing to conduct his own defence, X said. The magistrate, passing sentence, said. “
But Shama approved of the new regime. She said, “It will teach you to have some respect for
people and the truth.”
“Hear you. Hear you! But you don’t surprise me. I expect you to talk like that. But let them
wait. New regime, eh. Just see the circulation drop now.”
It was only to Shama that Mr. Biswas spoke about the changes. At the office the subject was
never mentioned. Mr. Burnett’s favourites avoided one another and, fearing intrigue, mixed with no
one else. Apart from the posters there had been no directive, but they had all, so far as their new
duties permitted o writing, changed their styles. They wrote longer paragraphs of complete
sentences with bigger words.
Presently the directives came, in a booklet called Rules for Reporters ; and it was in keeping
with the aloof severity of the new authorities that the booklets should have appeared on every desk
one morning without explanation, with only the name of the reporter, preceded by a “Mr”, in the top
right-hand corner.
“He must have got up early this morning,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama.
The booklet contained rules about language, dress, behaviour, and at the bottom of every page
there was a slogan. On the front cover was printed “THE RIGHTEST NEWS IS THE BRIGHTEST
NEWS”, the inverted commas suggesting that the statement was historical, witty and wise. The
back cover said: REPORT NOT DISTORT.
“Report not distort,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “That is all the son of a bitch doing now, you
know, and drawing a fat salary for it too. Making up those slogans. Rules for Reporters. Rules !”
A few days later he came home and said, “Guess what? Editor peeing in a special place now,
you know. ‘Excuse me. But I must go and pee–alone.’ Everybody peeing in the same place for
years. What happen? He taking a course of Dodd’s Kidney Pills and peeing blue or something?”
In Shama’s accounts Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder appeared more often, always written
out in full.
“Just watch and see,” Mr. Biswas said. “Everybody going to leave. People not going to put up
with this sort of treatment, I tell you.”
“When you leaving?” Shama asked.
And worse was to come.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose they just want to frighten me. I will henceforward–
henceforward: you hear the sort of words that son of a bitch using–I will henceforward spend my
afternoons at the cemeteries of Port of Spain. Just hand me that yellow book. Rules for Reporters!
Let me see. Anything about funerals? By God! They damn well have it in! ‘The Sentinel reporter
should be soberly dressed on these occasions, that is, in a dark suit.’ Dark suit! The man must think
I haven’t got a wife and four children. He must think he paying me a fortune every fortnight.
‘Neither by his demeanour nor by his dress should the reporter offend the mourners, since this will
certainly lose the paper much goodwill. The Sentinel reporter should remember that he represents
the Sentinel . He should encourage trust. It cannot be stressed too often that the reporter should get
every name right. A name incorrectly spelt is offensive. All orders and decorations should be
mentioned, but the reporter should use his discretion in making inquiries about these. To be
ignorant of an individual’s decorations is almost certain to offend him. To ask an OBE whether he
is an MBE is equally likely to offend. Far better, in this hypothetical case, to make inquiries on the
assumption that the individual is a CBE. After the immediate family, the names of all mourners
should be set out in alphabetical order.’
“God! God ! Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave
afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s
Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids.
Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo
of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: ‘Smiling, Mrs. X? We thought so. Where
there’s a will there is a way.’ Two photos side by side.”
In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the
wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr. Biswas was often
inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about
names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.
“A capitalist rag,” he began to say. “Just another capitalist rag.”
Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.
“Glad like hell,” Mr. Biswas said.
And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get
the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the
assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match,
copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and
thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to
be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there
was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way
those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the
scores he had gathered were not printed.
He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. “I can make
a living by my pen,” he said. “Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.” At this period
one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. “Start my own
magazine,” Mr. Biswas said. “Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell
his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!”
He abandoned his own regime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various
members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well.
From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.
“Anand, on your way to school stop at the caf and telephone the Sentinel . Tell them I don’t
feel like coming to work today.”
“Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.”
“We can’t always do what we like, boy.”
“And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.”
“Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.”
When Anand left, Mr. Biswas would say, “Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell.
Think I care? I want them to sack me.”
“Yes,” Shama said. “You want them to sack you.”
But he was careful to space out these days.
He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket
on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them
from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad,
his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the caf and
telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in
the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he
cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.
He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use
on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling
more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens.
Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the
grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that
his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the
most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself,
which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and
though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the
meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He
said, “I don’t want you to be like me.”
Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a
responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by
exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.
Suddenly the pressure ceased at the Sentinel . Mr. Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals
and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.
“If they did just push me so much farther,” he told Shama, “I would have resigned.”
“Yes. You would have resigned.”
“Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I ever bother to talk to you.”
He had in fact mentally composed many sonorous letters of resignation, varying from the
abusive to the dignified to the humorous and even to the charitable (these ended with his best
wishes for the continued success of the Sentinel ).
But the features he now wrote were not the features he wrote for Mr. Burnett. He didn’t write
scandalous interviews with one-eyed men: he wrote serious surveys of the work done by the
Institute for the Blind. He didn’t write “I Am Trinidad’s Maddest Man”: he wrote about the
splendid work of the Lunatic Asylum. It was his duty to praise, to look always beyond the facts to
the official figures; for it was part of the Sentinel’s new policy of sobriety that this was the best of
all worlds and Trinidad’s official institutions its most magnificent aspects. He had not so much to
distort as to ignore: to forget the bare, toughened feet of the children in an orphanage, the sullen
looks of dread, the shameful uniforms; to accept a temporary shaming eminence and walk through
workshops and vegetable gardens, noting industry, rehabilitation and discipline; to have lemonade
and a cigarette in the director’s office, and get the figures; to put himself on the side of the
grotesques.
These features were not easy to write. In the days of Mr. Burnett once he had got a slant and
an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph,
and his articles had a flow and a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the
time came when he was not sure what he did feel. He had to note down ideas and juggle them into
place. He wrote and rewrote, working extremely slowly, nagged by continual headaches,
completing his articles only to meet the Thursday deadline. The results were laboured, dead,
incapable of giving pleasure except to the people written about. He didn’t look forward to Sunday.
He was up early as usual, but the paper remained on the front steps until Shama or one of the
children brought it in. He avoided turning to his article for as long as possible. It was always a
surprise, when he did turn to it, to see how photographs and layout concealed the dullness of the
matter. Even then he did not read through what he had written, but glanced at odd paragraphs,
looking for cuts and changes that would indicate editorial disapproval. He said nothing to Shama,
but he lived now in constant expectation of the sack. He knew his work was not good.
At the office the authorities remained aloof. There was no criticism, but no reassurance. The
new regime was still a forbidden subject and reporters still did not mix easily. Of Mr. Burnett’s
favourites only the former news editor was generally accepted; he had, indeed, become an office
character. He had grown haggard with worry. He lived in Barataria and came up every morning by
bus through the packed, narrow and dangerous Eastern Main Road. He had developed a fear that he
would die in a road accident and leave his wife and baby daughter unprovided for. All travel
terrified him; morning and evening he had to travel; and every day he laid out stories of accidents,
with photographs of “the twisted wreckage”. He spoke continually of his fear, ridiculed it and
allowed himself to be ridiculed. But as the afternoon wore on his agitation became more marked,
and at the end he was quite frantic, anxious to go home, yet fearing to leave the office, the only
place where he felt safe.
Untended, the rose trees grew straggly and hard. A blight made their stems white and gave
them sickly, ill-formed leaves. The buds opened slowly to reveal blanched, tattered blooms covered
with minute insects; other insects built bright brown domes on the stems. The lily-pond collapsed
again and the lily-roots rose brown and shaggy out of the thick, muddy water, which was white with
bubbles. The children’s interest in the garden was spasmodic, and Shama, claiming that she had
learned not to interfere with anything of Mr. Biswas’s, planted some zinnias and marigolds of her
own, the only things, apart from an oleander tree and some cactus, that had flourished in the garden
of Hanuman House.
The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr. Biswas’s salary
was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven
dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the Sentinel started giving COLA, a cost-of-living allowance.
Henceforth it was COLA that went up; the salary remained stationary.
“Psychology,” Mr. Biswas said. They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?” He
raised his voice. “All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?”
The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her
accounts, filling reporter’s notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they
lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.
There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on
stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and
imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils;
and Shama’s food became worse.
To Mr. Biswas’s complaints she said, “I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a
cent there.”
And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from
week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.
“Trapped!” Mr. Biswas would say. “You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.”
“Yes,” Shama would say. “I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof
over your head.”
“Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month.
Don’t talk to me about your family.”
“I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children–”
And often, in the end, Mr. Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through
the city, stopping at some empty shack of a caf to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his
stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese
shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies
slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even
the deadest two o”clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren
heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the
Sentinel’s presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets, funerals (with all
names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more
than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy caf , the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric
flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeeper picking
his teeth, waiting to close.
And in the house, while he was out, the children would come out of bed and go to Shama. She
would take down her bloated reporter’s notebooks and try to explain how she had spent the money
given her.
At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, “Your father and mother does
quarrel?”
“What about?”
“Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.”
“Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it.
Boy!”
One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to
Mr. Biswas’s room and said, “I have a story to tell you.”
Something in his manner warned Mr. Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against
the head of the bed and smiled.
“Once upon a time there was a man–” Anand’s voice broke.
“Yes?” Mr. Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with
his teeth.
“Once upon a time there was a man who–” His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused
him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, “Who,
whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.”
Mr. Biswas burst out laughing, and Anand ran out of the room, trembling with rage and
humiliation, to the kitchen, where Shama comforted him.
For many days Anand didn’t speak to Mr. Biswas and, in secret revenge, didn’t drink milk at
the Dairies, but iced coffee. Mr. Biswas was effusive towards Savi and Myna and Kamla, and
relaxed with Shama. The atmosphere in the house was less heavy and Shama, now Anand’s
defender, took much pleasure in urging Anand to speak to his father.
“Leave him, leave him,” Mr. Biswas said. “Leave the storyteller.”
Anand became steadily more morose. When he came home after private lessons one afternoon
he refused to eat or talk. He went to his room, lay down on the bed and, despite Shama’s coaxings,
stayed there.
Mr. Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, “Well,
well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?”
“Eat some prunes, son,” Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table
drawer.
Mr. Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. “What’s the matter?”
Anand said, “The boys laugh at me.”
“He who laughs last laughs best,” Shama said.
“Lawrence say that his father is your boss.”
There was silence.
Mr. Biswas sat on the bed and said, “Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.”
“He say they have you like an office boy in the office.”
“You know I write features.”
“And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.”
Mr. Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the
notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.
“You never went to his father house?”
“Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?” Shama said.
“And you never went to the back door?”
Mr. Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.
“Let me put on the light,” Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on.
Anand covered his face with his arm. “Is that all that’s been upsetting you?” Shama asked. “Your
father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said. “
Mr. Biswas went out of the room.
Shama said, “You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.”
For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as noisily as she
could.
The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his
pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr. Biswas came to him and said, “I
don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All
of us. You know that.”
On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as
delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new
house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern
manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork
hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in
interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were
stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawing-room they studied Tara’s
photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin,
big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old,
slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered
about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the
various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch
on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.
The following week-end they went again, and the weekend after that; and soon this week-end
visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was
reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George
Street station Mr. Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even
impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city,
the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed
dark and clumsy.
Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken
antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor
quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s
house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or
because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said
afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never
went again.
She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to
Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old
warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and
did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way
of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little
to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt
the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself
exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.
So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr. Biswas and
the children returned with sadness after the week-end.
And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr. Biswas struggled with features on
the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and
the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer),
Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were
discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely
punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the
blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to
good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr. Biswas read Anand Self-Help
and on his birthday gave him Duty , adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from
Shakespeare . Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils
only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts
of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition
notes called “schoolboy’s pranks”.
Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the
brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played
truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private
lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony
which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the
teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr. Biswas, anxious to remain in
the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a
young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged
and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr. Biswas said, “Those private lessons are costing me
money, you know.” “Pranks” were permitted only in English Composition.
Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared
Mr. Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately attracted by this ceremony. His
cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret
verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of
play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved
head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation.
But he knew Mr. Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr. Biswas one evening that he
was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless.
He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr. Biswas to write
this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr. Biswas, he wanted no east-west
compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama
to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the
wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his
prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment;
and Mr. Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide
the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that
the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been
initiated.
Shama was thrilled.
But Mr. Biswas said, “Wait till the long holidays.”
And so, during the long holidays, when Savi and Myna and Kamla were making their round
of holiday visits, including a fortnight at a beach house Ajodha had rented, Anand, shaved and
thoroughly brahmin, but ashamed of showing his bald head, stayed in Port of Spain and Mr. Biswas
gave him portions of Macdougall’s Grammar to learn and listened to him recite his geography and
English notes. The evening worship of Lakshmi stopped.
Towards the end of that year a letter came to Mr. Biswas from Chicago. The stamp was
cancelled: REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER. Though the envelope was long
the letter was short, a third of the paper being taken up by the florid, raised red and black letterhead
of a newspaper. The letter was from Mr. Burnett.
Dear Mohun, As you can see, I have left my little circus and am back in the old business. As a
matter of fact I didn’t leave the circus. It left me. Perhaps fire in Trinidad is different. But when that
boy from St. James was given one small American fire to walk through, he just ran. Away. My
guess is that he is somewhere on Ellis Island, with nobody to claim him. The snake-charmer was all
right until his snake bit him. We gave him a good funeral. I hunted high and low to get a Hindu
priest to say the last few words, but no luck. I was going to do the job myself, but I couldn’t dress
the part, not being able to tie the headpiece or the tailpiece. Now and then I see a copy of the
Sentinel . Why don’t you give America a try?
Though the letter was a joke and nothing in it was to be taken seriously, Mr. Biswas was
moved that Mr. Burnett had written at all. He immediately began to reply, and went on for pages,
writing detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff. He thought he was being light and
detached, but when at lunchtime he re-read what he had written he saw how bitter he appeared, how
much he had revealed of himself. He tore the letter up. From time to time, until he died, he thought
of writing. But he never wrote. And Mr. Burnett never wrote again.
The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year,
talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back
verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when
no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had
bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like
machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled of oil; and it was a wonder that cloth
emerged clean and unmangled from the clanking, champing and chattering which Shama called
forth from the creature by the touch of a finger on its bloody bandaged tail. The back verandah
smelled of machine oil and new cloth and became dangerous with pins on the floor and pins
between floorboards. Anand marvelled at the delight of his sisters in the tedious operations, and
marvelled at their ability to put on dresses bristling with pins and not be pricked. Shama made him
two shirts with long tails, the fashion among the boys at school (even exhibition pupils have their
unscholarly moments) being for billowing shirts, barely tucked into the trousers.
But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.
One afternoon Mr. Biswas came back from the Sentinel and as soon as he pushed his cycle
through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and
the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the
corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white
and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their illformed leaves had not
begun to quail; they still looked alive.
He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.
“Shama!”
He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah.
The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.
“Shama!”
She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.
He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the
kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw
the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated
iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And
Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette
holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.
He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running
down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and
he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned
it, Shama saying from the verandah, “No, no,” picked up a large stained wet stone from the
bleaching-bed and “Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?” Scraping the
words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone
just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in
Seth’s eyes. “Pa!” one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying “Man, man.” His wrist was
seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.
Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit
beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the
imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.
Seth said, “You see. You make your children frighten like hell.” And to the loaders, “All
right, all right.”
The unloading continued.
“Rose trees?” Seth said. “They did just look like black sage bush to me.”
“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said. “Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!” he added.
“Tough!” As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.
“Oops!” Seth said.
“Tough!” Mr. Biswas repeated, walking away.
Shama followed him.
Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.
“Thug!” Mr. Biswas said, going up the steps.
“Eh, eh,” Seth said, smiling at the children. “Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep
in the road.”
From the verandah Mr. Biswas, unseen, said, “This is not the end of this. The old lady will
have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.”
Seth laughed. “The old hen and the big god, eh?” He looked up at the verandah and said in
Hindi, “Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this
house was bought?”
Mr. Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.
Anand looked away.
“You will be hearing from my solicitor,” Mr. Biswas said. “And those two rakshas you have
with you. They too.” He disappeared again.
The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil,
unloaded.
Seth winked at the children. “Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he
own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him.
And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?”
“Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!” Shama called.
“You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother?
You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.”
“Savi! Anand!”
They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr. Biswas.
“Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me
with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of
them–your father, mother and all–all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.”
From somewhere in the house Mr. Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.
Seth moved to the lorry.
“Eh, Ewart?” he said gently to one of the loaders. “They was nice roses, eh?”
Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.
Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled.
Then he stopped smiling and said, “We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.”
The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the
loaders.
Mr. Biswas’s mutterings died away.
Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was
silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.
A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.
“Cut down the rose trees,” Mr. Biswas was shouting. “Cut them down. Break up everything
else.”
The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from
room to room, pulling things down.
Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr. Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence
cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied
the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the
night chatterers, around the lamp-post.
Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr. Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and
Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr.
Biswas’s garden.
On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became
unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.
Mr. Biswas came down the front steps.
“Come with me for a walk.”
Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he
wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.
The damage was slight. Mr. Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of
Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the
ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankamcharya had
suffered especially. Mrs. Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops,
crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass
vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their
shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but
it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen
no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.
When Mr. Biswas returned his mood had changed.
“Shama, how did those marble tops break?” he asked, mimicking Mrs. Tulsi. Then he acted
himself. “Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break.
Now I wonder how that happened.” He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. “Didn’t know
metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like
packed sand.” As for the re-diffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and
disembowelled, he said, “I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they
replace sets free.”
When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, “I feel we
listen to it too hard.” They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.
Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr. Biswas had never
thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale,
the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.
3. The Shortfalls Adventure
Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled
in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit
Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and
ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every
evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously.
The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else
except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers,
tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu
status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain,
they would be only exotic.
But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found
Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be
abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of
Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.
The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of
the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas
goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr. Biswas’s faded, peeling
signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.
And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had
already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House and were living
in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shortfalls. The cause of the
quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth
abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs. Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar,
besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had
forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the
Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs. Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House;
she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the
breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a
tribute to the rightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s
brutality.
The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice
of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours
that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi property as his own. The husbands of some
sisters said they had been threatened.
Yet the talk was less of Seth than of the new estate. Shama heard its glories listed again and
again. In the grounds of the estate house there was a cricket field and a swimming pool; the drive
was lined with orange trees and gri-gri palms with slender white trunks, red berries and dark green
leaves. The land itself was a wonder. The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could
swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-shaped flowers
through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles,
coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean. Fruit trees, mango,
orange, avocado pear, were so plentiful as to seem wild. And there were nutmeg trees, as well as
cedar, poui , and the bois-canot which was light yet so springy and strong it made you a better
cricket bat than the willow. The sisters spoke of the hills, the sweet springs and hidden waterfalls
with all the excitement of people who had known only the hot, open plain, the flat acres of
sugarcane and the muddy ricelands. Even if one didn’t have a way with land, as they had, if one did
nothing, life could be rich at Shorthills. There was talk of dairy fanning; there was talk of growing
grapefruit. More particularly, there was talk of rearing sheep, and of an idyllic project of giving one
sheep to every child as his very own, the foundation, it was made to appear, of fabulous wealth.
And there were horses on the estate: the children would learn to ride.
Though it was never clear afterwards why this large decision had been taken so suddenly, and
puzzling that the last corporate effort of the Tulsis should have been directed towards this
uprooting, Shama left for Port of Spain full of enthusiasm. She wanted to be part of her family
again, to share the adventure.
“Horses?” Mr. Biswas said. “I bet you when you go there all you find is one old monkey
swinging from the liana on the saman tree. I can’t understand this craziness that possess your
family.”
Shama spoke about the sheep.
“Sheep?” Mr. Biswas said. “To ride?”
She said that Seth was no longer part of the family and that two husbands who had left
Hanuman House after disagreements with Seth had rejoined the family for the move to Shortfalls.
Mr. Biswas didn’t listen. “About those sheep. Savi get one, Anand get one, Myna get one,
Kamla get one. Make four in all. What are we going to do with four sheep. Breed more? To sell and
kill? Hindus, eh? Feeding and fattening just in order to kill. Or you see the six of us sitting down
and making wool from four sheep? You know how to make wool? Any of your family know how to
make wool?”
The children did not want to move to a place they didn’t know, and they were a little
frightened of living with the Tulsis again. Above all, they did not want to be referred to as “country
pupils” at school; the advantages–being released fifteen minutes earlier in the afternoon–could not
make up for the shame. And Mr. Biswas turned Shama’s propaganda into a joke. He read out “The
Emperor’s New Clothes” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist ; he drove imaginary flocks of sheep
through the drawingroom, making bleating noises. As always during the holidays, he announced his
arrival by ringing his bicycle bell from the road; then the children walked out in single file to meet
him, staggering under imaginary loads. “Watch it, Savi!” he would call. “Those tonka beans are
heavy like hell, you know.” Later he would ask, “Make a lot of wool today?” And once, when
Anand came into the drawingroom just as the lavatory chain was pulled, Mr. Biswas said, “Walking
back? What’s the matter? Forgot your horse at the waterfall?”
Shama sulked.
“Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! Anand, Savi, Myna! Come and sing a Christmas
carol for your mother.”
They sang “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”.
Shama’s gloom, persisting, defeated them all. And that Christmas, the first they spent by
themselves, was made more memorable by Shama’s gloom. She could not make icecream because
she didn’t have a freezer, but she did what she could to turn the day into a miniature Hanuman
House Christmas. She got up early and waited to be kissed, like Mrs. Tulsi. She spread a white cloth
on the table and put out nuts and dates and red apples; she cooked an extravagant meal. She did
everything punctiliously, but as one martyred. “Anybody would think you were making another
baby,” Mr. Biswas said. And in his diary, a Sentinel reporter’s notebook which he had begun to fill
at Mr. Biswas’s suggestion, as an additional exercise in English Composition and as practice in
natural writing, Anand wrote, “This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent;” and, not
forgetting the literary purpose of the diary, added, “I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.”
But Shama never relented.
Soon she received impressive assistance. The house became full of sisters and husbands on
their way to and from Shorthills. The fine dresses, veils and jewellery of the sisters contrasted with
their mood, which they seemed to get from Shama. They fixed Mr. Biswas with injured, helpless,
accusing woman’s looks which he found difficult to ignore. The jokes about sheep and waterfalls
and tonka beans stopped; he locked himself in his room. Sometimes Shama, after much coaxing
from her sisters, dressed and went to Shorthills with them. She came back gloomier than ever, and
when Mr. Biswas said, “Well, tell me, girl, tell me,” she did not reply and only cried silently. When
Mrs. Tulsi came Shama cried all the time.
Since the quarrel with Seth Mrs. Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid. She had left the Rose
Room to direct the move from Arwacas and was, indeed, the source of the new enthusiasm. She
tried to persuade Mr. Biswas to join the move, and Mr. Biswas, flattered at this attention, listened
sympathetically. There would be no Seth, Mrs. Tulsi said; one could live for nothing at Shorthills;
Mr. Biswas would be able to save his salary; there were many good sites for houses, and with
timber from the estate Mr. Biswas might even build himself a little house.
“Leave him, leave him,” Shama said. “All this talk about house was only to spite me.”
“But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the
estate,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Never mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth,
she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to
make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to
have a look at the estate.
He made Anand telephone the Sentinel and went with Mrs. Tulsi to the bus stop. There he
suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from
wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs. Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of
Spain street, and Mr. Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned
against the lamp-post, hiding his face.
“Regular bus service,” he said after a time.
“From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.”
“Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.”
At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made
locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr. Biswas bumped
exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. “Just practising,” he said.
The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed anl dipped; hills
intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr. Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout.
“Estate?” They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels
stood in the hard yellow yard. “Cricket field?” Mr. Biswas said. “Swimming pool?”
After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening
valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of
greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green,
showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road,
widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of
colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.
“Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,” the conductor said conversationally. Mr. Biswas
got up. Mrs. Tulsi pulled him down. “They like to reverse first.” The bus reversed in a dirt lane and
came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.
The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the
lane in which the bus had reversed Mr. Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded
wreaths alone indicating its purpose.
Mr. Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few
tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the
mountain which rose at the end. “Estate?” he asked.
Mrs. Tulsi smiled. “And on this side.” She waved at the other side of the road.
Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones
and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr. Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. “A lot of bamboo,” he
said. “You could start a paper factory.”
It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its
centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges
obscured by the untended verge.
“I suppose we go along there,” Mr. Biswas said.
They began walking.
Mrs. Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. “Rabbit meat,” she said. “Best food
for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.”
Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white
blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr.
Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as
any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine
they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower.
Beyond it Mr. Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the
untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr. Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted
the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them.
Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods
gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that
had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees,
heavy with leaf and fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they
heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus
starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it
was less than an hour away!
The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a
soft vine of a tender green. Mrs. Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it
had a faint smell of mint.
“Old man’s beard,” she said. “In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.”
The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite
vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch;
and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with
orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall,
nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.
An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint:
Christopher Columbus Road . It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt
new.
“This used to be the old road,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
And Mr. Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road
before the world grew dark for them.
Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at
the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor;
it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white
against the surrounding green.
And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the
pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond
the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy,
plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water;
and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom
above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries
and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be
seen whole, and could even be missed.
Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr. Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited.
Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.
“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said, breaking the silence. “Horses.”
“That’s not a horse,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs. Tulsi held a
liana and offered it to Mr. Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. “As
strong as rope,” she said. “The children could skip with this.”
They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine,
rippled sand. “You could just sell the sand from this place,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They came to the broad
flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr. Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending
steps like these.
On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray
marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete
and the stunted shrubs called “green tea” and “red tea”. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree
stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.
“Just the spot for a temple,” Mrs. Tulsi whispered.
The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey,
flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen
separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms
whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment,
Mrs. Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom
with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick
oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green
hillside just a few feet away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.
“Who owned the house before?” Mr. Biswas asked.
“Some French people.”
This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Remain
Rolland, gave Mr. Biswas a respect for the French.
They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it
was an enchantment.
They heard the bus in the distance.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose it is time to go home now.”
“Home?” said Mrs. Tulsi. “Isn’t this your home now?”
So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with
Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one
of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that
Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of the
Port of Spain house. Mr. Biswas was shocked, and to shock him further Shama brought down her
account books and showed how his salary went to the grocer almost as soon as it came, how her
debts were rising.
The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without
protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and
Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community.
They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French
patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the
house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every
Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the
coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the
afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The
couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.
Mr. Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased.
Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away
from Hanuman House had brought their families; and there were many married grandchildren as
well, and their families.
Mr. Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a
central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and
children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr. Biswas’s room became the headquarters
of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain,
there that Mr. Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable,
the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair,
hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.
The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could
be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and
the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the
equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.
A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr. Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across
the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man
who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.
Anand said, “Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.”
Mr. Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.
Anand reported, “All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield
marked ‘Boots’. And they are all by a man called W. C. Tuttle.”
“Trash,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Trash,” Anand told Prakash.
“You call my books trash?” Prakash’s father asked Mr. Biswas some mornings later, when
they opened their doors at the same time.
“I didn’t call your books trash.”
The nostrils quivered. “What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?”
“How do you know about my Epictetus?”
“How do you know about my books?”
Thereafter Mr. Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were
comments.
“So you start up already?” Shama said.
And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming
pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house
repainted.
Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they
could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs. Tulsi
had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree
on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the
temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the
drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew
more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way
between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron
and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.
Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to
be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a
dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey
verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass
flogging.
Mr. Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For
him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and
Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity
to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado
pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a caf keeper in St. Vincent Street with some story about the
variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of
plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr. Biswas. Cycling to work in
the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look
right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his
saddle and cycle measuredly away, whistling.
He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug
up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and
the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters
and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so
near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.
The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be
married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at
Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details–the bridegrooms and dowries–
had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing
for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians
came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the
kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.
Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo
poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and
fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be
suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt
protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seven cavalcades with seven
teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were
seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the gardens flattened for
the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming
pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.
When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the
guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone
began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts
mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed,
for the unruined garden to be replanted. Unasked, the children did what they could, but their
scattered efforts made no impression on the grounds. They collected tonka beans from the hillside
and, not knowing what to do with them, left them in the garage, where they presently rotted and
smelled.
Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Half a dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The
children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to
claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the
cricketers.
Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced
and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or
direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs. Tulsi had
now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s
box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there,
in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It
was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had
depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.
Govind tore down the cricket pavilion one day. A rough cowshed went up in its place, and
Mr. Biswas heard, with astonishment, that his cow was to be stabled there.
“Cow? My cow?”
It turned out that the cow, whose name was Mutri, was one of Shama’s secret possessions,
like her sewingmachine. Mutri had been kept on the estate at Arwacas with all the other Tulsi cows.
She was an old black cow, tired, with short bruised horns.
“What about the milk?” Mr. Biswas asked. “The calves?”
“What about the grass?” Shama replied. “The water? The feed?”
Govind looked after the cows and for that reason alone Mr. Biswas made no further inquiries.
Govind was becoming increasingly surly. He scarcely spoke to anyone, and worked off his rages on
the cows. He beat them with thick lengths of wood and at milking time the slightest misdemeanour
threw him into a rage. The animals didn’t moan or wince or show anger; they only tried to move
away. No one protested; there was no one to complain to.
Mr. Biswas said, “Poor Mutri.”
Before cows and sheep the cricketers retreated. The cricket field turned to mud and manure,
and someone planted a pumpkin vine at the edge of it.
Then the tree-cutting began. In less than a morning the reader of W. C. Tutde cut down the
gri-gri palms along the drive. He came back sweating to the house and, since none of the watertaps
worked, had a bath at a waterbarrel. Mrs. Tulsi ate the hearts of the trees, which had been
recommended to her by one of her Arwacas friends, and the children consoled themselves with the
red berries. Govind, asserting himself, then cut down the orange trees: they were blighted,
encouraged snakes, and could conceal thieves.
“Damn stupid thieves if they think they could find anything in this place,” Mr. Biswas said.
“They cut down the trees only to make it easier to pick the oranges, that is all.”
The oranges were collected by Govind and Chinta and their children, put into sacks and sent
to Port of Spain by bus. Everyone wondered who took the money. The trees were chopped into logs
and burned in the kitchen, the moss-covered barks making excellent kindling.
The children lost heart. They now had to be compelled to gather tonka beans, to pick oranges
and avocado pears to be sent to Port of Spain. On some Saturdays they pulled up weeds from the
drive, urged on by the adults to hollow competitions to see who could amass the highest pile of
weeds.
The plumbing remained unrepaired. Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. The
house toilet, unused, became a sewingroom.
In place of the orange trees and the palm trees: eedlings were planted along the drive and
hedged around with bamboo stakes. The cows broke down the cricket field fence. The sheep,
escaping, broke down the bamboo stakes and stripped the seedlings clean. The silt rose in the canal
at the side of the drive. Weeds grew from the cracks in the concrete culvert and up the wide,
shallow steps.
Every morning Hari said his prayers and rang his bell and beat his gong in his boxboard
kennel in the ruined garden; and every evening the man Mr. Biswas now thought of as W. C. Tuttle
said his prayers before the framed print in the drawingroom. The rubbish heap started by the Tulsis
at the foot of the hill grew higher and wider. The sheep, neglected, unfruitful, survived. The cows
were milked. The pumpkin vine spread rapidly in the manured mud and broke into frail yellow
flower. The first pumpkin, the first Tulsi fruit, was welcomed with enthusiasm; and since, because
of a Hindu taboo no one could explain, women were forbidden to cut pumpkins open, a man was
invited to do so. And the man was W. C. Tuttle.
It was W. C. Tuttle who dismantled the electricity plant and melted down the lead to make
dumbbells. And it was W. C. Tuttle who announced that a furniture factory was to be started.
Scores of cedar trees were cut down, sawed and stacked in the garage, and W. C. Tuttle sent to his
own village for a Negro called Theophile. Theophile was a blacksmith whose trade had declined
with the coming of the motorcar. He was lodged in a small room below the drawing-room, fed three
times a day and turned loose among the cedar planks. He made many benches; gaining confidence,
he put together a vast, irregularly oval table; then a number of wardrobes like sentry-boxes. No joint
was clean; no door fitted; and the soft wood showed many little clusters of hammer indentations. It
was stated by W. C. Tuttle, his wife, his children and Theophile himself that stain and varnish
would hide these flaws. And, Tulsi excitement mounting, Theophile went to work on moms chairs.
W. C. Tuttle ordered a bookcase. Mr. Biswas ordered a bookcase. The doors of Mr. Biswas’s
bookcase sloped at the top and would have formed a peak if they could meet: Theophile said it was
a style. By this time the planks on the oval table had shrunk, the joints were loose and the wax had
dropped out, and the wardrobe doors could never close. Theophile worked with saw and hammer
and nails on the table and wardrobes; then the chairs and bookcases needed attention; then the
wardrobes gave trouble again. Theophile was dismissed to his village, and there was no further talk
about the furniture factory. The morris chairs fell apart and were used as firewood; some of the
more adventurous children slept on the table at night. W. C. Tuttle, acting as Mrs. Tulsi’s agent,
sold the cedar planks in the garage. Shortly afterwards he bought a lorry, and hired it out to the
Americans.
Then the Americans came to the village. They had decided to build a post somewhere in the
mountains, and day and night army lorries rolled through the village on skid chains. The lane next
to the cemetery was widened and on the dark green mountains in the distance a thin dirt-red line
zigzagged upwards. The Tulsi widows got together, built a shack at the corner of the lane and
stocked it with Coca Cola, cakes, oranges and avocado pears. The American lorries didn’t stop. The
widows spent some money on a liquor licence and, with great trepidation, spent more money on
cases of rum. The lorries didn’t stop. One night a lorry crashed into the shack. The widows
retreated.
Though surrounded by devastation, Mr. Biswas remained detached. He paid no rent; he spent
nothing on food; he was saving most of his salary. For the first time he had money, and every
fortnight it was increasing. He closed his heart to sorrow and anger at a dereliction he was
powerless to prevent; and, recognizing with a thrill that it was now every man for himself–the
phrase gave him much pleasure–he continued to plunder, enjoying the feeling that in the midst of
chaos he was calmly going about his own devilish plans.
Then the news of the ravages of W. C. Tuttle and Govind was whispered through the house.
W. C. Tuttle had been selling whole cedar trees. Govind had been selling lorry loads of oranges and
papaws and avocado pears and limes and grapefruit and cocoa and tonka beans. Mr. Biswas felt
exceedingly foolish next morning when he dropped half a dozen oranges into his bag. He wondered,
too, how it was possible for someone to steal a cedar tree without being noticed. Shama, outraged
like most of the sisters, explained the trees had been sold on the ground, for very little. The buyers’
lorries had come to the estate from the north, taking the roundabout, dangerous and virtually unused
road over the mountains. Nothing would have been known had not the clearing on the hillside
grown too large and attracted the attention of the estate overseer, a sad worried man who had come
with the estate, like the mule, and without knowing what his duties were, had to look occupied to
keep his job.
Govind and Chinta ignored the whispers and silence. W. C. Tuttle replied to them by
scowling and exercising with his dumbbells. His wife looked offended. The nine little Tuttles
refused to speak to the other children.
The villagers at last banded against the Tulsis. Many of the Tulsi children were going to
schools in Port of Spain and they filled the seven o”clock bus at the terminus near the graveyard.
The villagers, who had hitherto found the hourly bus service to Port of Spain quite adequate, began
to board the bus just before it reached the graveyard, paying the extra penny to be sure of their seat
to Port of Spain. And the children found that the seven o”clock bus came in nearly full, and no one
got out. There was no great competition for the vacant seats, and for many days most of the children
did not go to school, until W. C. Tuttle, frowningly forgiving, offered, for no more than the bus
fare, to take the children to school on his lorry.
The lorry had to be at the American base at six in the morning. Therefore the children could
not be deposited at school much after half past five. To do this they had to leave Shorthills at a
quarter to five. So they had to be up at four. It was still night when, sitting close together on planks
fixed to the tray of the lorry, their teeth chattering, they drove through the chilly hills below the low
dripping trees; and the street lamps were still on when they got to Port of Spain. They were put
down outside their schools before newsboys delivered papers, before servants were up, before the
school gates opened. They remained on the pavement and played hopscotch in the pre-dawn light.
The caretaker of the girls’ school rose at six and dressed hurriedly and let them in, asking them not
to make too much noise and disturb his wife, who was still asleep. The caretaker’s house was small,
with only two rooms and a tiny, partly-exposed kitchen; and the caretaker had a numerous family.
They had been used to wandering about the school yard in the early mornings dressed as they
pleased; they brushed their teeth and spat in the sandy yard; they quarrelled; they slipped naked
from house to outdoor bathroom and towelled themselves in the open; they cooked and ate under
the tamarind tree; they hung up intimate washing. Now correctness was imposed on them from
dawn. While the caretaker and his family breakfasted, in silence, the children became hungry again
and ate the lunches which had been prepared from them three hours before. It was the best time to
eat the lunches, for by midday the curry was beginning to go red and smell. The children who kept
their food till lunchtime often gave it away then in exchange for things like bread and cheese; and,
the reputation of Indian food surviving even Tulsi cooking, both sides thought they were getting the
better bargain.
The return to Shortfalls had its own problems. The children left school at three. The lorry left
the American base at six. It was therefore out of the question if the children were to get home before
eight. And the bus service from Port of Spain became more difficult from week to week. Because of
wartime shortages and restrictions there were fewer city buses, and the Shorthills bus was used by
people who didn’t go all the way. To get the bus the children had to walk nearly three miles to the
terminus at the railway station. The last uncrowded bus was the two-thirty; to get this meant leaving
school shortly after lunch. The child who hoped to get the three-thirty left school at half past two,
walked to the terminus and joined the waiting crowd. There was no queue and the bus on its arrival
became the object of an immediate scrimmage. People scrambled through the open windows,
climbing up on tyres and the cap of the petrol tank, and burst through the emergency exit at the
back; so that even if a child managed to squeeze in first through the door he found the seats taken.
So the children walked until they could be taken on by the bus when it was less full, or by the lorry
returning from the American base. Mrs. Tulsi sent word from her room that the children could
lessen the fatigue of walking in the afternoon if they all sang; if the girls were molested they were to
take off their shoes (they wore crepe soles) and strike the molester on the head.
Eventually, however, a car was bought, and one of the sons-in-law drove it to Port of Spain
with the children and the oranges. It was a Ford V-8 of the early nineteen-thirties, not inelegant, and
it might have performed less erratically if it carried a lighter load. Under the weight of children and
oranges it sank low on the rear springs, the bonnet was slightly uptilted, and for the steeper climbs
the children had to get off. Often the car broke down and then the driver, who knew nothing about
cars, asked the children to push. Like ants around a dead cockroach the children surrounded the car
(the girls in their dark blue uniforms) and pushed and pulled. Sometimes they pushed for more than
a mile. Sometimes they pushed the car to the top of a hill, jumped aside as it rolled down, heard it
start, raced after it, the driver urging them to hurry, sprang inside three at a time. Then the engine
stalled; and they sat, crouched or half-stood, suffocated and silent, waiting for the fruitless, scraping
whine of the starter. Sometimes the car got into Port of Spain with one side of the bonnet up and a
child on the wing, operating a pump of some sort. Sometimes the car didn’t get to Port of Spain at
all. This pleased the children more than the driver; he had no packed lunch. Sometimes the car was
laid up for days. Then the children went to Port of Spain by lorry; or they surprised the villagers,
who had relaxed their precautions, by taking the seven o”clock bus.
The Ford V-8 was finally abandoned when some of the lesser sons-in-law, not profiting by the
experience of the children, went in it one evening to a film-show in Port of Spain. The house blazed
with lights all night; and the sisters concerned, armed with sticks to daunt molesters, made frequent
sallies along the Port of Spain road. The men returned just before dawn, pushing. The children went
to school by lorry. The car was pushed from the road into the gully and up to the clump of wild
tannia under the saman tree, where, being presently stripped by an unknown person of its saleable
parts, it remained, a plaything for the children.
Another car was bought, another Ford V-8, but a sports model with a dicky seat. And into
this, miraculously, all the children were squeezed, standing in the dicky seat like stemmed flowers
in a vase. A second trip was made for the oranges. While they were in the country the children
could pretend to be on the top of a stagecoach, but when they got to Port of Spain they attracted
derisive attention and missed the shelter of the saloon.
So for the children Shorthills became a nightmare. Daylight was nearly always gone when
they returned, and there was little to return to. The food grew rougher and rougher and was eaten
more casually, in the kitchen itself, where the brick floor had been topped with mud, or in the
covered space between the kitchen and the house. No child knew from one night to the next where
he was going to sleep; beds were made anywhere and at any time. On Saturdays the children pulled
up weeds; on Sundays they collected oranges or other fruit.
At week-ends the children submitted to the laws of the family. But during the week, when
they spent so much time away from the house, they formed a community of their own, outside
family laws. No one ruled; there were only the weak and the strong. Affection between brother and
sister was despised. No alliance was stable. Only enmities were lasting, and the hot afternoon walks
which Mrs. Tulsi had seen lightened by song were often broken by bitter fights of pure hate.
Mr. Biswas scarcely saw his children, and they became separated from one another. Anand
felt disgraced by his sisters. They were all among the weak. Myna had developed a bad bladder;
every journey with her involved shame. Sometimes the car stopped, sometimes it didn’t. Kamla
walked in her sleep; but this was a novelty and was thought endearing, especially in one so young.
Savi was unnoticed until she had been chosen to sing at a school concert organized by the
distributors of a face lotion called Limacol. She had never used Limacol but agreed with the master
of ceremonies that the slogan, “The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle”, was just. Then in a high
voice and with many quaverings she sang “Some Sunday Morning” and was given a miniature
Limacol bottle. The Tulsi sisters were shocked. They spoke of Savi almost as of a public
entertainer, and lectured their children. Thereafter Savi was mocked and ridiculed. She drew maps
with minutely indented coastlines, on the basis of her observations at beaches. She had attempted to
propagate this method and had some disciples; but now one of Govind’s daughters said that these
indentations were as stupid and conceited as the quavers with which Savi had sung “Some Sunday
Morning”, and Savi’s disciples recanted. When one evening she was put off the bus because she had
lost her fare, and had to walk all the way to Shorthills, arriving after nightfall, ill with fright and
fatigue, and having to be massaged by Shama, it was felt that justice had been done. The news of
the massage in the room on the upper floor, Savi’s tears, Mr. Biswas’s rage when he returned,
quickly went round the house. Kamla, the petted sleepwalker, was pumped for details, and Kamla
gave them, pleased to excite so much interest and amusement.
Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept
him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and at
Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to
self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.
The children were ready to go to school one morning. Their lunches, wrapped in brown paper,
were stuffed in their bags, and the car was waiting on the road. Quickly the children filled the car.
They squashed in. They wedged themselves in. They screwed themselves in. A door was slammed.
Anand, somewhere in the dicky seat, heard a shriek and a groan. They came from Savi. The
children, always breathless and bad-tempered when the car was stationary, shouted for the car to
drive off. But someone cried, “Quick! Open the door. Her hand.”
Anand laughed. No one joined him. The car emptied and he saw Savi sitting on the wet
rabbit-grass of the verge. He could not bear to look at her hand.
Shama and Mr. Biswas and some of the sisters came out to the road.
Myna said, “Anand laugh, Pa.”
Mr. Biswas slapped Anand hard.
And Mr. Biswas decided that the time had come for him to withdraw from the Shorthills
adventure. A return to Port of Spain was impossible. When he went for walks about the estate he
kept his eye open for a suitable site.
Then, in quick succession, a number of deaths occurred.
Sharma, the son-in-law who collected oranges and drove the children to school, slipped off a
mossy orange branch one rainy morning and broke his neck. He died almost at once. The children
did not go to school that day. Sharma’s widow tried to turn the holiday into a day of mourning. She
sobbed and wailed and embraced everyone who went near her and asked for messages to be sent.
Messages were sent and Sharma’s relations turned up in the afternoon, nondescript people, not able
even in their sorrow to drown their shyness. They put Sharma in a plain coffin and carried him to
the graveyard, where the village had assembled to see the Hindu rites. Hari, in white jacket and
beads, whined over the grave and sprinkled water over it with a mango leaf.
“Same thing he did to my house,” Mr. Biswas said to Anand.
Sharma’s widow shrieked, fainted, revived and tried to fling herself into the grave. The
villagers watched with interest. Some of the knowing whispered about suttee .
W. C. Tuttle took over the job of driving the children to school. He placed all his children in
the front seat next to himself and stuffed the others into the dicky seat. He complained about the
behaviour of the car and attributed all its faults to Sharma. Soon there was talk that W. C. Tuttle
was using the car to transport his subsidiary plunder. He threatened not to drive the car if the talk
didn’t stop. There was no one else who could drive, apart from the surly Govind, and the talk
stopped.
Despite W. C. Tuttle’s abuse Sharma was speedily forgotten. And one hot Sunday afternoon,
when nearly everyone was out of doors, Anand came upon Hari and his wife sitting alone in the
diningroom, at one end of the vast cedar table that had been made by W. C. Tuttle’s blacksmith.
They made a sad couple. Hari’s wife had tears in her eyes, and Hari’s expressionless face was
yellow. Anand, wishing to animate them and to show off a new accomplishment, offered to recite a
poem to them. He had just mastered all the gestures illustrated on the frontispiece of Bell’s
Standard Elocutionist . Hari and his wife looked moved; they smiled and asked Anand to recite.
Anand drew his feet together, bowed, and said, “Bingen on the Rhine.” He joined his palms,
rested his head on them, and recited:
“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers .”
He was pleased to see that the smiles of Hari and his wife had been replaced by looks of the
utmost solemnity.
“There was lack of woman’s nursing , there was dearth of woman’s tears.
“But a comrade stood beside him while his life blood ebbed away .”
Anand’s voice quavered with emotion. Hari stared at the floor. His wife fixed her large eyes
on a spot somewhere above Anand’s shoulder. Anand had not expected such a full and immediate
response. He increased the pathos in his voice, spoke more slowly and exaggerated his gestures.
With both hands on his left breast he acted out the last words of the dying legionnaire.
“Tell her the last night of my life , for ere this moon be risen,
“My body will be out of pain , my soul be out of prison.”
Hari’s wife burst out crying. Hari put his hand on hers. In this way they listened to the end;
and Anand, after being given a six-cents piece, left them shaken.
Less than a week later Hari died. It was only then that Anand learned that Hari had known for
some time that he was going to die soon. W. C. Tuttle, ferociously brahminical in an embroidered
silk jacket, did the last rites. The house went into mourning for Hari; no one used sugar or salt. He
was one of those men who, by a negativeness that amounts to charity, are thought of kindly by
everyone. He had taken part in no disputes; his goodness, like his scholarship, was a family
tradition. Everyone had been used to seeing Hari as the officiating pundit at religious ceremonies;
everyone had been used to receiving the consecrated foods from him every morning. Hari, in dhoti,
his forehead marked with sandalwood paste; Hari doing morning and evening puja ; Hari with his
religious texts on the elaborately carved bookrest: these had been fixed sights in the Tulsi house.
There had been no one to take Seth’s place. There was no one to take Hari’s.
The duty of the puja was shared by many of the men and boys. Sometimes even Anand had
to do it. Untutored in the prayers, he could only go through the motions of the ritual. He washed the
images, placed fresh flowers on the shrine, diverted himself by trying to stick the stem of a flower
in the crook of a god’s arm or between the god’s chin and chest. He put fresh sandalwood paste on
the foreheads of the gods, on the smooth black and rose and yellow pebbles, and on his own
forehead; lit the camphor, circled the flame about the shrine with his right hand while with his left
he tried to ring the bell; blew at the conch shell, emitting a sound like that of a heavy wardrobe
scraping on a wooden floor; then, his cheeks aching from the effort of blowing the conch shell, he
hurried out to eat, first making the round of the house to offer the milk and tulsi leaves which,
unbelievably, he had consecrated. When he dressed for school he brushed the caked sandalwood
marks from his forehead.
About a fortnight after Hari died news came from Arwacas of another death. Anand was
working at the table in the room on the upper floor one evening, and Mr. Biswas was reading in
bed, when the door was thrown open and Savi ran in and said, “Great Aunt Padma is dead!”
Mr. Biswas closed his eyes and put his hand on his heart.
Anand screamed, “Savi!”
She stood still, her eyes shining.
From downstairs a deep-drawn lamentation burst out and spread through the house, rising,
falling, relayed from one sister to the other and back again, like the barking of dogs at night.
Sharma’s death had done little more than upset routine. Hari’s had saddened. Padma’s
terrified. She was Mrs. Tulsi’s sister: death had come closer to them all. She had known them all
their lives; she had died away from them. The sisters said these things over and over as they
embraced each other and embraced their children. The house shook with footsteps, shrieks, wails
and the crying of frightened children. Mrs. Tulsi was reported to be out of her mind; there were
rumours that she too was dying. The children stuck pins into lamp wicks and murmured
incantations to keep off fresh disaster. They heard Mrs. Tulsi clamouring to be taken to the body of
her sister. The cry was taken up by some of the sisters, and despite the hour and despite the quarrel
with Seth, preparations were made and the lorry and sports car set off for Arwacas, and only men
and children were left in the house.
The women returned the following afternoon, with more than their grief. For most of them it
had been their first visit to Arwacas since the move, their first glimpse of Seth. They had not spoken
to him, but the truce had enabled them to inspect the property which Seth, still vigorously pursuing
the quarrel, had bought on the High Street not far from Hanuman House, a first step, they had been
told, to his buying over of Hanuman House itself. It was a grocery and it was large enough and new
enough and well enough stocked to alarm the sisters. But there could be no talk of Seth just then.
Padma appeared in many dreams that night. In the morning every dream was recounted and it
was agreed that Padma’s spirit had come to the house in Shorthills, which she had never visited
while she lived. This was confirmed by the experience of one sister. In the middle of the night she
had heard footsteps in the road. She recognized them as Padma’s. There was silence as Padma had
crossed the gully, footsteps again as Padma came up the sandy drive and up the concrete steps.
Padma had then made a tour of the house, sat down on the back steps and wept. Many people saw
Padma after that. Much attention was given to the story of one of the Tuttle children. In broad
daylight he had seen a woman in white walking from the graveyard towards the house. He caught
up with her and said, “Aunt.” She turned. It wasn’t an aunt. It was Padma; she was crying. Before
he could speak she pulled her veil over her face, and he had run. When he looked back he saw no
one.
Yet it was some time before the sisters realized that Padma appeared so often because she had
a message. They then decided that anyone who saw her should ask what her message was. The
messages varied. At first Padma merely asked after certain people and said she wished she were
alive and with them; sometimes she also said she had died of a broken heart. But Padma’s later
messages, when whispered from sister to sister, from child to child, caused consternation. She said
Seth had driven her to take poison; she said Seth had poisoned her; she said Seth had beaten her to
death and bribed the doctor not to have a post mortem.
“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters said.
Anger overrode their grief. Every sister cursed Seth and vowed never to speak to him again.
Mrs. Tulsi kept to the room with the closed windows. Sushila and Miss Blackie made brandy
poultices for her eyelids, as before, and massaged her head with bay rum. But in the box-board
temple at the end of the ruined, overgrown garden there was no Hari to say prayers for her and the
house. Bells were rung and gongs were struck, but the luck, the virtue had gone out of the family.
And two of the sheep died. The canal at the side of the drive was at last completely silted over
and the rain, which ran down the hillside in torrents after the briefest shower, flooded the flat land.
The gully, no longer supported by the roots, began to be eaten away. The old man’s beard was
deprived of a footing; its thin tangled roots hung over the banks like a threadbare carpet. The gully
bed, washed clean of black soil and the plants that grew on it, showed sandy, then pebbly, then
rocky. It could no longer be forded by the car, and the car stayed on the road. The sisters were
puzzled by the erosion, which seemed to them sudden; but they accepted it as part of their new fate.
Govind stopped looking after the cows. He bought a secondhand motorcar and operated it as a
taxi in Port of Spain. W. C. Tuttle opened a quarry on the estate. His enterprise aroused envy. He
had been the first to sell estate trees; now that there were few trees to sell he was selling the very
earth. Mr. Biswas continued to transport his plunder of oranges and avocado pears in the saddlebag
of his bicycle.
For nearly all the sisters still with husbands Shorthills had become only an interlude. For the
widows there was only Shorthills, and land they did not understand. It was not rice-land or
caneland. But the widows united, and after much whispered discussion and ostentatious silence
when other sisters, husbands or their children were near, the widows announced that they were
going to start a chicken farm. To feed the chickens they needed maize. They cut down a hillside,
burned it, and planted maize. Then they bought some chickens and set them loose. At first the
chickens stayed close to the house and sometimes inside it, leaving their droppings everywhere.
Presently snakes and mongooses attacked the chickens. Those that survived took to the bush,
learned to fly high, and laid their eggs where the widows couldn’t get them. In the meantime the
maize was reaped and husked. The widows and their children ate much corn, boiled and roasted.
The remainder was heaped in the verandah; there were no chickens to give it to. The corn turned
from pale yellow to hard bright orange. Intermittently the widows and their children shelled the
cobs on graters. There was talk of selling maize flour; with the continuing shortage of wheat flour
the prospects were considered bright. The widows invested in a mill: two circular slabs of toothed
stone resting one on the other. After some time and much labour a little flour was ground, but there
was not the demand for it that the widows had expected. The maize remained in the verandah;
weevils and other insects burrowed neatly through the golden cobs.
Mrs. Tulsi remained in her dark room, devising economies and issuing directives about food.
She had heard that the Chinese, an ancient race, ate bamboo shoots. The estate abounded in
bamboo; Mrs. Tulsi ordered that bamboo shoots were to be eaten. But what were bamboo shoots?
Were they the neat little green buds at the joints of the bamboo trunks? Were they the very young
bamboo stalks? Were they the very young bamboo leaves? No one knew. Buds, stalks and leaves
were collected, washed, chopped, boiled, and curried with tomatoes. No one could eat it. The leaves
of the shining bush, a prolific shrub that grew even in sand, had been used in the house to make a
mildly purgative brew that was not unpleasant and was reputedly good for colds, coughs and fevers.
Mrs. Tulsi directed that tea should no longer be bought: the shining bush was to be used instead.
Already the widows and their children were making coffee and chocolate from the beans on the
estate. Now maize flour was to be used instead of wheat flour, and coconut oil was to be made, not
bought. No one had thought of growing vegetables and, since they too could not be bought, efforts
were made to find vegetable substitutes: hard coconut, green papaw, green mango, green pomme
cith re , and almost any green fruit. But when Mrs. Tulsi ordered the widows to experiment with
birds’ nests, which the Chinese ate, and the widows looked at the long stockinglike corn-bird nests
of dry twigs hanging from the saman tree, there was such an outcry that the idea was dropped.
It was W. C. Tuttle’s duty, after taking the children to school, to bring back stale cakes for the
cows. To prevent them being stolen, the cakes were heaped in the verandah next to the widows’ dry
corn. The widows’ children, foraging among the stale cakes, came upon some that were still edible.
The news was reported to Mrs. Tulsi; thereafter stale cakes were shared between the cows and the
widows. In this period of experiment many new foods were discovered. The children discovered
that brown sugar in a dry pancake made a better lunch than curried bamboo, which could not be
exchanged for anything at school. Someone hit upon the idea of dipping sardines in condensed
milk, and someone else made the accidental discovery that condensed milk burned in the tin had an
original and pleasing flavour.
Economy went further. Directing that no tins were to be thrown away, Mrs. Tulsi summoned
a tinker from Arwacas. For a fortnight he shared the household food, slept in the verandah, and
made tin cups and tin plates; from a sardine tin he made a whistle. Ink was no longer bought; a
violet liquid, faint but unwashable, was extracted from the small berries of the black sage. Mrs.
Tulsi, hearing that coconut husks were being thrown away, decided that mattresses and cushions
were to be made, and possibly sold. The widows and their children soaked and pounded and
stretched and shredded the coconut husks, washed the fibre and dried it. Then Mrs. Tulsi sent for
the mattress-maker from Arwacas. He came and made mattresses and cushions for a month.
Sisters with husbands fed their children secretly. And when it was learned that some of the
widows’ sons had killed a sheep, roasted it in the woods and eaten it, W. C. Tuttle expressed his
outrage at this un-Hindu act, refused to eat any more from the common kitchen and made his wife
cook separately. One of his sons reported that W. C. Tuttle’s brahmin mouth had burst into sores the
day the sheep was eaten. Mr. Biswas, though unable to produce W. C. Tuttle’s spectacular
symptoms, made Shama cook separately as well. Touched by the prevailing obsession with food,
Mr. Biswas had been making experiments of his own. He had decided that the gospo, a mixture of
the orange and the lemon, and the shadduck, which no one ate, had extraordinary virtues. There was
one gospo tree on the estate, and the fruit had been used by the children to play cricket (using bats
of bois-canot ). Mr. Biswas put an end to that. He drank a glass of the unpleasant gospo juice every
morning and made his children do the same, until the gospo tree, which stood at one corner of the
cricket field, collapsed into the gully after a flood, still laden with its hybrid fruit.
With the disappearance of the gospo tree the cricket field shrank rapidly. After every shower
part of it was carved away, leaving a grass-covered overhang which collapsed in a day or two and
was carried off by the next downpour. The drive became tall with weeds, and through the weeds a
narrow, curiously wavering path led to the concrete steps, now cracked and sagging and bursting
into vegetation at every crack. The evergreen hedge was a tangle of small trees, and whenever it
rained the grounds smelled fresh, as of fish, telling that snakes were about.
No one had time to fight the bush. The widows, when not cooking or washing or cleaning or
looking after the cows, were making coffee or chocolate or coconut oil or grinding maize. Their
clothes became patched, their arms hard. They looked like labourers, and they had to bear with the
exulting comments Seth sent through common friends. He had given his life to the family; then he
had been rejected and slandered. Their punishment was only beginning. Had he not said that when
he left them they would all start catching crabs?
And the widows worked like men. When the gully became a gorge they threw a bridge of
coconut trunks across it. The gorge widened; the trunks collapsed. The widows built another bridge;
that collapsed too. The widows prevailed on Mrs. Tulsi to buy lengths of rail. The rails were laid
across the gorge, coconut trunks laid across the rails, and for a time this structure survived, shaky,
slippery, with gaps through which a child might fall to the rocks below.
Mr. Biswas could no longer ignore the dereliction about him; yet when he spoke about
moving, Shama, though excluded from the councils of the widows and the confidences of the other
sisters, became sullen and sometimes cried.
Then came the scandal of the eighty dollars.
Chinta announced one day that someone had stolen eighty dollars from her room. It was an
astonishing announcement, not only because an accusation of theft had never been made in the
family before, but also because no one knew that Chinta and Govind had so much money. Chinta
told again and again of the last time she had checked the money, and of the accident that had led her
to find out that the money was missing. She said she knew who had stolen the money, but was
waiting for the thief to trip himself up.
After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing
crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with
a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the
spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she
decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.
“The old Roman cat and kitten,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “Like mother, like daughter. But
look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.”
This was repeated throughout the house.
Chinta said, “I don’t blame him.”
The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints
Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and
the innocence of everyone except Mr. Biswas and his family was established.
Mr. Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should
allow the children to be tried. “She is a Roman cat,” he said. “So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?”
For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted
to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.
“I am not blaming anybody,” Chinta said. “I am only blaming the man who set the example.”
Then the whisperings began.
“Don’t talk to them. But watch them.”
“Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.”
“Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.”
“Savi does eat the scabs of sores.”
“You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.”
And the girls begged Mr. Biswas to move.
He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was
some way from the estate house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The
house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of
the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It
had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided
the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing. He bought corrugated iron for the roof, plain glass
and frosted glass for the windows, coloured glass for the drawingroom door, and cement for the
pillars.
The speed with which the house went up took him by surprise. The builders had given him no
opportunity to withdraw, and at the end he found that his savings were nearly all gone. He felt
uneasy. His circumstances had changed; but his ambition had remained steady, and now seemed
only idyllic and absurd. He had built his own house, in a place as wild and out-of-the-way as he
could have wished. But Shama had to walk a mile to the village to do her shopping, water had to be
brought up the hill from a spring in the cocoa woods. And there was the problem of transport. He
had to cycle long distances every day, and though he had cut himself off from the family, his
children had to go to school in the family car.
After he had bought a Slumberking bed (delivered by two Port of Spain vanmen who swore as
they made their various trips up and down the improperly cleared and precipitous path) his money
was exhausted. The house was not painted. It stood red-raw in its unregulated green setting, not
seeming to invite habitation so much as decay.
Shama, though pained by the quarrel with Chinta, did not approve of the move. She regarded
it as provocative, and like the children, she had watched the house rise and wished it not to be
completed. The children wanted to go back to Port of Spain, to the life they had had before
Shorthills. They knew about the housing shortage but blamed Mr. Biswas for not trying hard
enough. The new house imprisoned them in silence and bush. They had no pleasures, no cinema
shows, no walks, no games even, for the land around the house still smelled of snakes. The nights
seemed longer and blacker. The girls stayed close to Shama, as though frightened to be by
themselves; and in her shanty kitchen Shama sang sad Hindi songs.
Late one afternoon, not long after they had moved, Anand found himself alone in the house.
Mr. Biswas was out, the girls were in the kitchen with Shama. The house felt bare, unused and still
exposed; corners held no secrets; none of the furniture seemed to have found its place. Moved by
boredom more than curiosity, Anand opened the bottom drawer of Shama’s dressingtable. In an
envelope he found his parents’ marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his sisters and
himself. On a birth certificate, which he did not at first recognize as Savi’s, he saw a name, Basso,
which he had never heard used. He saw Mr. Biswas’s harsh scrawl: Real calling name : Lakshmi .
In the column headed “Father’s Occupation” labourer had been energetically scratched out and
proprietor written in. No other birth certificate had been so scribbled over. Some photographs were
wrapped in crinkled brown paper. One was of the Tulsi sisters standing in a straight line and
scowling; the others were of the entire Tulsi family, of Hanuman House, of Pundit Tulsi, of Pundit
Tulsi in Hanuman House.
In the kitchen Shama was singing her doleful song and slapping dough between her palms.
Anand came upon a bundle of letters. They were all still in their envelopes. The stamps were
English and bore the head of George V. From one envelope fell small brown photographs of an
English girl, a dog, a house with a faded X on a window; in another envelope there was a
newspaper clipping with one name underlined in ink in a long paragraph of names. The letters were
neatly written and said little at great length. They spoke about letters received, about school, about
holidays; they thanked for photographs. Abruptly they were touched with feeling; they expressed
surprise that arrangements for marriage had been made so soon; they attempted to soften surprise
with congratulation. Then there were no more letters.
Anand closed the drawer and went to the drawingroom. He rested his elbows on the
windowsill and looked out. The sun had just set and the bush was turning black against a sky that
was still clear. Smoke came through the kitchen door and window and Anand listened to Shama
singing. Darkness filled the valley.
That evening Shama discovered the ransacked drawer.
“Thief!” she said. “Some thief was in the house.”
Refusing to yield to the gloom of his family and his own feeling that he had been rash, Mr.
Biswas set about clearing the land. He spared only the poui trees, for their branches and their
yellow flowers, which came out bright and pure for one week in the year. The integrity of living
bush was replaced by a brown chaos of collapsed and dying trees. Through this Mr. Biswas made a
winding path from the house down to the road, cutting steps into the earth and shoring them with
bamboo. The debris could not be immediately fired, for though the leaves were dead and brittle the
wood was green. Waiting, Mr. Biswas cut poui sticks and roasted them in bonfires. And he was
reminded of a duty.
He sent for his mother. He had for so long been telling her–ever since he was a boy in the
back trace–that she was to come to stay with him when he had built his own house, that he now
doubted whether she would come. But she came, for a fortnight. Her feelings could not be read. He
was at first extravagantly affectionate. But Bipti remained calm, and Mr. Biswas followed her
example. It was as if the relationship between them had been granted without their asking, and had
only to be accepted.
Though the children understood Hindi they could no longer speak it, and this limited
communication between them and Bipti. From the start, however, Shama and Bipti got on well.
Shama gave not a hint of the sullenness she used with Bipti’s sister Tara; to Mr. Biswas’s surprise
and pleasure, she treated Bipti with all the respect of a Hindu daughter-in-law. She had touched
Bipti’s feet with her fingers when Bipti came, and she never appeared before Bipti with her head
uncovered.
Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr. Biswas
wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this
fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house
had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps
to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and
unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the
spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the
prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the
sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a
dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made
him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.
The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence
authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire
in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race
course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to
people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick
smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters
who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even
scorched.
Mr. Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and
prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he
summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking
the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a
twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr. Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the
children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.
“Is all right,” he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. “Is all right. Fire is a
funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.”
One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain.
“That one take your advice and gone underground,” Savi said.
“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. “Perhaps it is a little too
green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.”
There were protests.
Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.
“What’s the matter?”
“The heat,” Savi said.
“You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising.
A pack of clowns.”
From the kitchen Shama shouted, “Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.”
They went to examine the nests Mr. Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced:
shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded
unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking
the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a
businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there
were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.
“Fireworks,” Savi said.
“Well, do it yourself.”
The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They
poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and
became a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various
colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall
flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of
beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters
and twinkles.
“All right,” Mr. Biswas said. “Puja over. Books now.”
They retired to the bare drawingroom. From time to time they went to the window. The hill
was black against a lighter sky. Here and there it showed red and occasionally burst into yellow
flame, which seemed unsupported, dancing in the air.
Anand was in a bus, one of those dilapidated, crowded buses that ran between Shorthills and
Port of Spain. Something was wrong. He was lying on the floor of the bus and people were looking
down at him and chattering. The bus must have been running over a newly-repaired road: the
wheels were kicking up pebbles against the wings.
Myna and Kamla stood over him, and he was being shaken by Savi. He lay on his bedding in
the drawingroom.
“Fire!” Savi said.
“What o”clock it is?”
“Two or three. Get up. Quick.”
The chattering, the pebbles against the wings, was the noise of the fire. Through the window
he saw that the hill had turned red, and the land was red in places where no fire had been intended.
“Pa? Ma?” he asked.
“Outside. We have to go to the big house to tell them.”
The house appeared to be encircled by the red, unblazing bush. The heat made breathing
painful. Anand looked for the two poui trees at the top of the hill. They were black and leafless
against the sky.
Hurriedly he dressed.
“Don’t leave us,” Myna said.
He heard Mr. Biswas shouting outside, “Just beat it back. Just beat it back from the kitchen.
House safe. No bush around it. Just keep it back from the kitchen.”
“Savi!” Shama called. “Anand wake?”
“Don’t leave us,” Kamla cried.
All four children left the house and walked past the newly-forked land in front to the path that
led to the road. Just below the brow of the hill they were surprised by an absolute darkness.
Between the path and the road there was no fire.
Myna and Kamla began to cry, afraid of the darkness before them, the fire behind them.
“Leave them,” Shama called. “And hurry up.”
Savi and Anand picked their way down the earth steps they couldn’t see.
“You can hold my hand,” Anand said.
They held hands and worked their way down the hill, into the gully, up the gully and into the
road. Trees vaulted the blackness. The blackness was like a weight; it was as if they wore hats that
came down to their eyebrows. They didn’t look up, not willing to be reminded that darkness lay
above them and behind them as well as in front of them. They fixed their eyes on the road and
kicked the loose gravel for the noise. It was chilly.
“Say Rama Rama ,” Savi said. “It will keep away anything.”
They said Rama Rama ,
“Is Pa to blame for this,” Savi said suddenly.
The repetition of Rama Rama comforted them. They became used to the darkness. They
could distinguish trees a few yards ahead. The squat concrete box, where behind a steel door estate
explosives were kept, was a reassuring white blur on the roadside.
At last they came to the bridge of coconut trunks. The white fretwork along the eaves of the
house were visible. In Mrs. Tulsi’s room, as always at night, a light burned. They made their way
across the dangerous bridge and emerged into the open, grateful at that moment for the tree-cutting
of Govind and W. C. Tuttle. The tall wet weeds on the drive stroked their bare legs. They sniffed,
alert for the smell of snakes.
They heard a heavy breathing. They could not tell from which direction it came. They stopped
muttering Rama Rama , came close together and began to run towards the concrete steps, a distant
grey glow. The breathing followed, and a dull, unhurried tramp.
Glancing to his left, Anand saw the mule in the cricket field. It was following them, moving
along the snarled fence-wires. They reached the end of the drive. The mule reached the corner of
the field and stopped.
They ran up the concrete steps, avoiding the overhanging nutmeg tree. They fumbled with the
bolt on the verandah gate and the noise frightened them. They scratched at doors and windows,
tapped the wall of Mrs. Tulsi’s room, rattled the tall drawingroom doors. They called. There was no
reply. Every noise they made seemed to them an explosion. But in the silence and blackness they
were only whispering. Their footsteps, their knockings, Anand’s stumbling among the stale cakes
and the widow’s corn, sounded only like the scuttling of rats.
Then they heard voices: low and alarmed: one aunt whispering to another, Mrs. Tulsi calling
for Sushila.
Anand shouted: “Aunt!”
The voices were silenced. Then they were raised again, this time defiantly. Anand knocked
hard on a window.
A woman’s voice said, “Two of the little people!”
There was an exclamation.
They were thought to be the spirits of Hari and Padma.
Mrs. Tulsi groaned and spoke a Hindi exorcism. Inside, doors were opened, the floor
pounded. There was loud aggressive talk about sticks, cutlasses and God, while Sushila, the
sickroom widow, an expert on the supernatural, asked in a sweet conciliatory voice, “Poor little
people, what can we do for you?”
“Fire!” Anand cried.
“Fire,” Savi said.
“Our house on fire!”
And Sushila, though she had taken part in the whisperings against Savi and Mr. Biswas, found
herself obliged to continue talking sweetly to Savi and Anand.
The apprehension of the house turned to joyous energy at the news of the fire.
“But really,” Chinta said, as she happily got ready, “what fool doesn’t know that to set fire to
land in the night is to ask for trouble?”
Lights went on everywhere. Babies squealed, were hushed. Mrs. Tuttle was heard to say, “Put
something on your head, man. This dew isn’t good for anyone.” “A cutlass, a cutlass,” Sharma’s
widow called. And the children excitedly relayed the news: “Uncle Mohun’s house is burning
down!” Some thrilled alarmists feared that the fire might spread through the woods to the big house
itself; and there was speculation about the effects of the fire on the explosives.
The journey to the fire was like an excursion. Once there, the Tulsi party fell to work with a
will, cutting, clearing, beating. It became a celebration. Shama, host for the second time to her
family, prepared coffee in the kitchen, which was untouched. And Mr. Biswas, forgetful of
animosities, shouted to everyone, “Is all right. Is all right. Everything under control.”
Some eggs were discovered, burnt black, and dry inside. Whether they were snakes’ eggs or
the eggs of the widows’ errant hens no one knew. A snake was found burnt to death less than
twenty yards from the kitchen. “The hand of God,” Mr. Biswas said. “Burning the bitch up before it
bite me.”
Morning revealed the house, still red and raw, in a charred and smoking desolation. Villagers
came running to see, and were confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by
vandals.
“Charcoal, charcoal,” Mr. Biswas called to them. “Anybody want charcoal?”
For days afterwards the valley darkened with ash whenever the wind blew. Ash dusted the
plot Bipti had forked.
“Best thing for the land,” Mr. Biswas said. “Best sort of fertilizer.”
4. Among the Readers and Learners
He could not simply leave the house in Shorthills. He had to be released from it. And
presently this happened. Transport became impossible. The bus service deteriorated; the sports car
began to give as much trouble as its predecessor and had to be sold. And just about this time Mrs.
Tulsi’s house in Port of Spain fell vacant. Mr. Biswas was offered two rooms in it, and he
immediately accepted.
He considered himself lucky. The housing shortage in Port of Spain had been aggravated by
the steady arrival of illegal immigrants from the other islands in search of work with the Americans.
A whole shanty town had sprung up at the east end of the city; and even to buy a house was not to
assure yourself of a room, for there were now laws against the indiscriminate eviction Shama had so
coolly practised.
He put up a sign in the midst of the desolation he had created: HOUSE FOR RENT OR
SALE, and moved to Port of Spain. The Shorthills adventure was over. From it he had gained only
two pieces of furniture: the Slumberking bed and Theophile’s bookcase. And when he moved back
to the house in Port of Spain, he did not move alone.
The Tuttles came, Govind and Chinta and their children came, and Basdai, a widow. The
Tuttles occupied most of the house. They occupied the drawingroom, the diningroom, a bedroom,
the kitchen, the bathroom; this gave them effective control of both the front and back verandahs, for
which they paid no rent. Govind and Chinta had only one room. Chinta hinted that they could afford
more, but were saving and planning for better things; and, as if in promise of this, Govind suddenly
gave up wearing rough clothes, and for six successive days, during which he smiled maniacally at
everyone, appeared in a different threepiece suit. Every morning Chinta hung out five of Govind’s
suits in the sun, and brushed them. She cooked below the tall-pillared house, and her children slept
below the house, on long cedar benches which Theophile had made at Shorthills. Basdai, the
widow, lived in the servantroom, which stood by itself in the yard.
Mr. Biswas’s two rooms could be entered only through the front verandah, which was Tuttle
territory. At first Mr. Biswas slept in the inner room. Light and noise from the Tuttles’
drawingroom came through the ventilation gaps at the top of the partition and drove him to the front
room, where he was enraged by the constant passage of Shama and the children to and from the
inner room. Shama, like Chinta, cooked below the house; and when Mr. Biswas shouted for his
food or his Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, it had to be taken to him up the front steps, in full
view of the street.
The house was never quiet, and became almost unbearable when W. C. Tuttle bought a
gramophone. He played one record over and over:
One night when the moon was so mellow
Rosita met young man Wellow.
He held her like this, his loveliness,
And stole a kiss, this fellow.
Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum
–and here W. C. Tuttle always joined in, whistling, singing, drumming; so that whenever the
record came on, Mr. Biswas was compelled to listen, waiting for W. C. Tuttle’s accompaniment to:
Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum
Tippy-tippy-teeeee pi-tum-tum tum
A dispute also arose between W. C. Tuttle and Govind. They both parked their vehicles in the
garage at the side of the house, and in the morning one was invariably in the way of the other. They
conducted this quarrel without ever speaking to one another. W. C. Tuttle told Mrs. Tuttle that her
brothers-in-law were unlettered, Govind grunted at Chinta, and both wives listened penitentially.
And now, away from Mrs. Tulsi, the sisters also had daily squabbles of their own, about whose
children had dirtied the washing, whose children had left the we filthy. Basdai, the widow, often
mediated, and sometimes there were maudlin reconciliations in the Tuttles’ back verandah. It was
Chinta who remarked that these reconciliations had the habit of taking place after the Tuttles had
acquired some new item of furniture or clothing.
Despite the strict brahminical regime of his household, W. C. Tuttle was all for modernity. In
addition to the gramophone he possessed a radio, a number of dainty tables, a morris suite; and he
created a sensation when he bought a four foot high statue of a naked woman holding a torch. An
especially long truce followed the arrival of the torchbearer, and Myna, wandering about the
Tuttles’ establishment one day, accidentally broke off the torchbearing arm. The Tuttles sealed their
frontiers again. Myna, in response to wordless pressure, was flogged, and a frostiness came once
more into the relations between the Tuttles and the Biswases. Matters were not helped when Shama
announced that she had ordered a glass cabinet from the joiner in the next street.
The glass cabinet came.
Chinta shouted to her children in English. “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Stay away from the
front gate. I don’t want you to go breaking other people things and have other people saying that is
because I jealous.”
As the elegant cabinet was being taken up the front steps one of the glass doors swung open,
struck the steps and broke. This was observed by the Tuttles, imperfectly concealed behind the
jalousies on either side of the drawingroom door.
“Oh! Oh!” Mr. Biswas said that evening. “Glass cabinet come, Shama. Glass cabinet come,
girl. The only thing you have to do now is to get something to put inside it.”
She spread out the Japanese coffee-set on one shelf. The other shelves remained empty, and
the glass cabinet, for which she had committed herself to many months of debt, became another of
her possessions which were regarded as jokes, like her sewingmachine, her cow, the coffee-set. It
was placed in the front room, which was already choked with the Slumberking, Theophile’s
bookcase, the hatrack, the kitchen table and the rockingchair. Mr. Biswas said, “You know, Shama
girl, what we want to put these rooms really straight is another bed.”
In the house the crowding became worse. Basdai, the widow, who had occupied the
servantroom as a base for a financial assault on the city, gave up that plan and decided instead to
take in boarders and lodgers from Shorthills. The widows were now almost frantic to have their
children educated. There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone had to fight
for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where education was the only
protection. As fast as the children graduated from the infant school at Shorthills they were sent to
Port of Spain. Basdai boarded them.
Between her small servantroom and the back fence Basdai built an additional room of
galvanized iron. Here she cooked. The boarders ate on the steps of the servantroom, in the yard, and
below the main house. The girls slept in the servantroom with Basdai; the boys slept below the
house, with Govind’s children.
Sometimes, driven out by the crowd and the noise, Mr. Biswas took Anand for long night
walks in the quieter districts of Port of Spain. “Even the streets here are cleaner than that house,” he
said. “Let the sanitary inspector pay just one visit there, and everybody going to land up in jail.
Boarders, lodgers and all. I mad to lay a report myself
The house, pouring out a stream of scholars every morning and receiving a returning stream
in the afternoon, soon attracted the attention of the street. And whether it was this, or whether a
sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs. Tulsi had decided
to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions
and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow
clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the
house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this
was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for the
feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early
mornings, buzzed like a school.
The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups.
Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port
of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging
powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, “Read! Learn! Learn! Read!”
And every morning, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, his tie carefully knotted, Mr.
Biswas left this hell and cycled to the spacious, well-lit, well-ventilated office of the Sentinel .
Now when he said to Shama: “Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!” his
words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country
and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And
his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly
riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed
asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and
peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.
Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs. Tulsi’s friends and retainers
at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs. Tulsi, fulfilling
a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The
floggings and the rows increased. The cries of “Read! Learn!” increased; and every morning, not
long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls,
Mr. Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the Sentinel .
Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during
the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning;
and like Mr. Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers
and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house
bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.
Then once more Shama started to bring out her account books, and once more she showed
how impossible it was for them to live on what he earned. Self-disgust led to anger, shouts, tears,
something to add to the concentrated hubbub of the evening, the nerve-torn helplessness. In
daylight, in a Sentinel motorcar and with a Sentinel photographer, he drove through the open plain
to call on Indian farmers to get material for his feature on Prospects for This Year’s Rice Crop.
They, illiterate, not knowing to what he would return that evening, treated him as an incredibly
superior being. And these same men who, like his brothers, had started on the estates and saved and
bought land of their own, were building mansions; they were sending their sons to America and
Canada to become doctors and dentists. There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of
Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his
lorry to them; in the new cars; the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius
and Epictetus, despite Samuel Smiles, Mr. Biswas found himself barred.
It was now that he began to speak to his children of his childhood. He told them of the hut, the
men digging in the garden at night; he told them of the oil that was later found on the land. What
fortune might have been theirs, if only his father had not died, if only he had stuck to the land like
his brothers, if he had not gone to Pagotes, not become a sign-writer, not gone to Hanuman House,
not married! If only so many things had not happened!
He blamed his father; he blamed his mother; he blamed the Tulsis; he blamed Shama. Blame
succeeded blame confusedly in his mind; but more and more he blamed the Sentinel , and hinted
savagely to Shama, almost as if she were on the board of the paper, that he was going to keep his
eye open for another job, and that if the worst came to the worst he would get a job as a labourer
with the Americans.
“Labourer!” Shama said. “With those hammocks you have for muscles, I would like to see
how long you would last.”
Which either made him angry, or reduced him to an absurd puckishness. Then, lying on the
Slumberking in vest and pants, as was his wont when he indulged in speculations about the future,
he would lift up one leg and prod the slack calf with a finger, or make it swing, as he had done
when they were newly married, in the long room at Hanuman House. These were the times (for the
children were not excluded from this talk about money) when Mr. Biswas delivered insincere
homilies on the honest manner of his livelihood, and told his children that he had nothing to leave
them but good education and a sound training.
It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to
say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The
most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive
manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in
an American newspaper that “journalist” was a pompous word, had said that his father was a
reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his
father worked for the Americans. “That is what all of them are saying these days,” Anand said.
“Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?”
Mr. Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would
soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited
Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.
Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the
school–what did the boys call their parents?–Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said,
“Bap and Mai,” and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school,
unhesitatingly said, “Mummy and Daddy.” For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who
all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed ambition, push and
uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies
worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with
laden hampers.
Mr. Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the Sentinel to go to work for the
Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s
muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island
forever. But as a gesture of protest against the Sentinel , he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites
League of the Guardian , the rival paper; and in the Junior Guardian , for years thereafter, Mr.
Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced
when W. C. Turtle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.
The Sentinel had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors
that there might be something wrong with their policy that conditions in the colony could not be
better; they began to admit that readers might occasionally want views instead of news, and that
news was not necessarily bright if right. For not only was the Guardian winning over Sentinel
readers, the Guardian was also getting people who had never read newspapers. So the Sentinel
started the Deserving Destitutes Fund, the name suggesting that there was not a necessary
inconsistency between the fund and the leaders which spoke of the unemployed as the
unemployable. The Deserving Destitutes Fund was an answer to the Guardians Neediest Cases
Fund; but while the Neediest Cases Fund was a Christmas affair, the Deserving Destitutes Fund was
to be permanent.
Mr. Biswas was appointed investigator. It was his duty to read the applications from
destitutes, reject the undeserving, visit the others to see how deserving or desperate they were, and
then, if the circumstances warranted it, to write harrowing accounts of their plight, harrowing
enough to encourage contributions for the fund. He had to find one deserving destitute a day.
“Deserving Destitute number one,” he told Shama. “M. Biswas. Occupation: investigator of
Deserving Destitutes.”
The Sentinel could not have chosen a better way of terrifying Mr. Biswas, of reviving his
dread of the sack, illness or sudden disaster. Day after day he visited the mutilated, the defeated, the
futile and the insane living in conditions not far removed from his own: in suffocating rotting
wooden kennels, in sheds of box-board, canvas and tin, in dark and sweating concrete caverns. Day
after day he visited the eastern sections of the city where the narrow houses pressed their scabbed
and blistered fa ades together and hid the horrors that lay behind them: the constricted, undrained
backyards, coated with green slime, in the perpetual shadow of adjacent houses and the tall
rubble-stone fences against which additional sheds had been built: yards choked with flimsy
cooking sheds, crowded fowl-coops of wire-netting, bleaching stones spread with sour washing:
smell upon smell, but none overcoming the stench of cesspits and overloaded septic tanks: horror
increased by the litters of children, most of them illegitimate, with navels projecting inches out of
their bellies, as though they had been delivered with haste and disgust. Yet occasionally there was
the neat room, its major piece of furniture, a table, a chair, polished to brilliance; giving no hint of
the squalor it erupted into the yard. Day after day he came upon people so broken, so listless, it
would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them. But he could only lift his trouser
turn-ups, pick his way through mud and slime, investigate, write, move on.
He was treated with respect by most of the DDS or Deserving Destees, as, in order to lessen
the dread they inspired, he had begun to call them. But sometimes a destitute turned sullen and,
suddenly annoyed by Mr. Biswas’s probings, refused to divulge the harrowing details Mr. Biswas
needed for his copy. On these occasions Mr. Biswas was accused of being in league with the rich,
the laughing, the government. Sometimes he was threatened with violence. Then forgetting shoes
and trouser turn-ups, he retreated hastily to the street, pursued by words, his undignified movements
followed with idle interest by several dozen people, all destitute, all perhaps deserving. “Deserving
Destitute Turns Desperate,” he thought, visualizing the morning’s headline. (Though that would
never have done: the Sentinel wanted only the harrowing details, the grovelling gratitude.)
His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the
bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the
saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable.
Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and
down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.
There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health
and strength; “Indian, give me some money.” Occasionally exact sums were demanded: “Indian,
give me a shilling.” He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the
larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to
refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to
antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his
investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from
the Sentinel as expenses.
And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing
lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust
appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. “You from
the paper?” she asked. He nodded. “Give me some money,” she said, as roughly as any man. He
gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it.
“You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man give you money.” His experience on “Court
Shorts” enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and
prepared to go. “Where my money?” the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, “The
man–me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.” She called the women and
children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr. Biswas, feeling that
his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried
guiltily away.
It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who
merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely
to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted
money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr. Biswas. Many of his early
visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had
sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.
The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and
this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility
and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was
given a by-line and described as “Our Special Investigator”, which won Anand some respect at
school. And for the first time in his life Mr. Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But,
largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a
crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.
He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute.
Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed
and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance,
he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too
quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table
six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window
possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr. Biswas had been in the habit
of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a
huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr. Biswas tried to make
permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The
afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and
presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom
which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. “First and last diningtable I buy,”
Mr. Biswas said.
He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the
buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy
American called Bobby Breen singing “When There’s a Rainbow on the River”. Someone came
into the room and Mr. Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud
who the hell was standing in his light.
It was Shama. “Hurry up and get some clothes on,” she said excitedly. “Some people have
come to see you.”
He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become
investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a
destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was
investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man
by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to
investigate him as soon as possible.
Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much
self-satisfaction.
“Who?” he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable.
Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He
sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.
Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.
He relaxed. “I can’t see them outside?”
“Is private.”
“But how the hell I can see them inside here?” It was a problem. The widows would have to
stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have
to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from
below the pillow and threw it over himself.
Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their
best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and
conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes:
poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.
Mr. Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. “Can’t ask
you to sit down,” he said. “Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.”
The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr. Biswas. He stopped scratching his
arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and
dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.
Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.
Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?
She spoke in a steady, considered way.
Mr. Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.
Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?
It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on
their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them
at once. “What about the name?” he asked.
That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names
could be used.
Mr. Biswas thought rapidly. “But what about the children at school?”
They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil,
glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.
Mr. Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.
The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s
smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.
Mr. Biswas slapped his left arm. “I would lose my job.”
“But that time,” Sushila said, “when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around
dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.”
“That was different,” Mr. Biswas said. “I am sorry. Really.”
The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr. Biswas
until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the
matchbox rattled.
Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr. Biswas’s forehead,
sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr. Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the
widows trooped out of the door.
A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing “One Night
When the Moon Was so Mellow”.
“I am sorry,” Mr. Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. “But I would lose my job.
Sorry.”
And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their
case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s
estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United
Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all
over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political
statements, in his own stylish advertisements (“Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present…”)?
It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came
from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr. Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had
left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from
Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr.
Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible
to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.
Bhandat had given an address in the city centre which might have led someone without a
knowledge of the city’s slums to believe that Bhandat was a dealer in cocoa or sugar, an
import-and-export king. In fact he lived in a tenement that lay between an importer of eastern goods
and an exporter of sugar and copra. It was an old, Spanish style building. The flat fa ade, diversified
by irregular areas of missing plaster, small windows with broken shutters, and two rusty iron
balconies, rose directly from the pavement.
From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a
smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr. Biswas
remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent
spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and
mules. At every impediment the gutters had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin
on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended and heated by the afternoon sun, rose
suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr. Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow
of an archway between the tenement and the exporter’s. He leaned his bicycle against the cool wall,
fought off the bees from the exporter’s sugar, and made his way down a cobbled lane along which
ran a shallow green and black gutter, glittering in the gloom. The lane opened out into a paved yard
which was only slightly wider. On one side was the high blank wall of the exporter’s; on the other
was the wall of the tenement, with windows that gaped black above dingy curtains. A leaning
standpipe dripped on a mossy base and fed the gutter; at the end of the yard, their doors open, were
a newspaper-littered lavatory and a roofless bathroom. Above was the sky, bright blue. Sunlight
struck diagonally across the top of the exporter’s wall.
Beyond the standpipe Mr. Biswas turned into a passage. He was passing a curtained doorway
when a shrill voice cried out, almost gaily, “Mohun!”
He felt he had become a boy again. All the sense of weakness and shame returned.
It was a low, windowless room, lit only by the light from the passage. A folding screen barred
off one corner. In another corner there was a bed, and from it came gurgling happy sounds. Bhandat
was not decrepit. Mr. Biswas, who had feared to find him shrunken to a melodramatic Indian
decrepitude, was relieved. The face was thinner; but the bumps on the top lip were the same; the
eyebrows, still those of a worrying man, bunched over eyes that were still bright.
Bhandat raised thin arms. “You are my child, Mohun. Come.” The shrillness in the voice was
new.
“How are you, Uncle?”
Bhandat didn’t seem to hear. “Come, come. You may think you are a big man, but to me you
are still my child. Come, let me kiss you.”
Mr. Biswas stood on the sugarsack rug and bent over the stale-smelling bed. He was at once
pulled vigorously down. He saw that the distempered ceiling and walls were coated with dust and
soot, felt Bhandat’s unshaven chin scraping against his neck, felt Bhandat’s dry lips on his cheek.
Then he cried out. Bhandat had pulled sharply at his hair. He jumped back and Bhandat hooted.
Waiting for Bhandat to calm down, Mr. Biswas looked around the room. Clothes hung on one
wall from nails that had been driven into the mortar between the stones. On the gritty concrete floor
what had at first looked like bundles of clothes turned out to be stacks of newspapers. Next to the
screen there was a small table with more newspapers, a cheap writingpad, a bottle of ink and a
chewed pen: it was at that table, no doubt, that Bhandat had written his letter.
“You are examining my mansion, Mohun?”
Mr. Biswas refused to be moved. “I don’t know. It seems to me that you are all right here.
You should see how some people live.” And he nearly added, “You should see how I live.”
“I am an old man,” Bhandat said, in his new, hooting voice. His eyes became wet, and a
small, unreliable smile appeared on his lips.
Mr. Biswas edged further away from the bed.
Sounds came from behind the dingy cotton-print screen: a clink of a coal-pot ring, the striking
of a match, brisk fanning. The Chinese woman. A thrill of curiosity ran through Mr. Biswas. White
charcoal smoke rose above the screen, coiled about the room and escaped, racing, through the door.
“Why do you use Lux Toilet Soap?”
Mr. Biswas saw that Bhandat was staring at him earnestly. “Lux Toilet? I think we use
Palmolive. A green thing–”
Bhandat said in English, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is the soap used by lovely film
stars.”
Mr. Biswas was disturbed.
Bhandat turned on his side and began to rummage among the newspapers on the floor. “None
of my worthless sons ever come to see me. You are the only one, Mohun. But you were always like
that.” He frowned at a newspaper. “No. This one is over. Fernandes Rum. The perfect round in
every circle. That is the sort of thing they want. Rum, Mohun. Remember? Ah! Yes, this is the
one.” He handed Mr. Biswas a newspaper and Mr. Biswas read the details of the Lux slogan
competition. “Help an old man, Mohun. Tell me why you use Lux Toilet Soap.”
Mr. Biswas said, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is antiseptic, refreshing, fragrant and
inexpensive.”
Bhandat frowned. The words had made no impression on him. And Mr. Biswas knew for sure
then, what he had intuited and dismissed: Bhandat was deaf.
“Write it down, Mohun,” Bhandat cried. “Write it down before I forget it. I don’t have any
luck with these things. Crosswords. Missing Ball competitions. Slogans. They are all the same.”
While Mr. Biswas wrote, Bhandat began on an account of his life. His deafness must have
occurred some time ago: he spoke in complete sentences, which gave his talk a literary quality. It
was a familiar story of jobs acquired and lost, great enterprises which had failed, wonderful
opportunities Bhandat had not taken because of his own honesty or the dishonesty of his associates,
all of whom were now famous and rich.
He liked the slogan. “This is bound to win, Mohun. Now, what about the crosswords, Mohun.
Couldn’t you make me win just one?”
Mr. Biswas was saved from replying, for just then the woman came from behind the screen.
She moved briskly, furtively, setting an enamel plate with small yellow cakes on the table, pulling
out the chair, placing it next to where Mr. Biswas stood, then hurrying behind the screen again. She
was middle-aged, very thin, with a long neck and a small face. She gave an impression of
perpendicularity: her unwashed black hair hung straight, her washed-out blue cotton dress dropped
straight, her thin legs were straight.
Mr. Biswas looked at Bhandat for signs of embarrassment. But Bhandat went on talking
undisturbed about the competitions he had entered and lost.
The woman came out again with two tall enamel cups of tea. She put a cup on the table and
pushed the plate of cakes towards Mr. Biswas, who was now seated on the chair she had pulled out.
She gave the other cup to Bhandat, who sat up to receive it, handing her the sheet of paper on which
Mr. Biswas had written the slogan.
Bhandat sipped his tea, and for a moment he could have been Ajodha. The gesture was the
same: the slow bringing of the cup to the lips, the half-closing of the eyes, the lips resting on the
brim, the blowing at the tea. Then came the sip with closed eyes, as though the drink had been
consecrated; and peace spread across the tormented face.
He opened his eyes: torment returned. “It good, eh?” he said to the woman in English. She
glanced hastily at Mr. Biswas. She seemed anxious to return behind her screen.
“He is a big man now,” Bhandat said. “But you know, I did know him when he was a boy so
high.” He gave a hoot. “Yes, so high.”
Mr. Biswas tried to avoid Bhandat’s gaze by taking one of the yellow cakes and biting at it.
“Since he was a boy so high. He is a big man now. But I used to put the licks on him good
too, you know. Eh, Mohun? Yes, man.” Bhandat held the cup in his left hand and whipped his right
forefinger against his thumb.
This was the moment Mr. Biswas had feared. But now that it had come, he found only that he
was relieved. Bhandat had not revived the shame: he had removed it.
The cup trembled in Bhandat’s hand. The woman ran to the bed and opened her mouth wide.
No words came out of that mouth: only a clacking of the tongue that erupted, at the end, into a shrill
croak.
The tea had spilled on the bed, on Bhandat. And Mr. Biswas, thinking of deafness, dumbness,
insanity, the horror of the sexual act in that grimy room, felt the yellow cake turn to a sweet slippery
paste in his mouth. He could neither chew nor swallow. On the bed Bhandat was in a paroxysm of
rage, cursing in Hindi, while the woman, unheeding, took the cup from his hand, ran behind the
screen and brought out a floursack rag, burned in places, and began rubbing briskly on the sheet and
Bhandat’s vest.
“You awkward barren cow!” Bhandat screamed in Hindi. “Always full to the brim! Always
full to the brim!”
As she rubbed, her thin dress shook, revealing the thick coarse hair under her arms, the shape
of her graceless body, the outline of one of her undergarments. Mr. Biswas forced himself to
swallow the paste in his mouth and washed it down with the strong sweet tea. He was glad when the
woman rolled up the floursack rag, put it under Bhandat’s vest, and went behind the screen.
Bhandat calmed down at once. He smiled impishly at Mr. Biswas and said, “She doesn’t
understand Hindi.”
Mr. Biswas rose to go.
The woman appeared again, and croaked at Bhandat.
“Stay and eat a proper meal, Mohun,” Bhandat said. “I am not so poor that I can’t afford to
feed my child.”
Mr. Biswas shook his head and tapped the notebook in his jacket pocket.
The woman withdrew.
“Antiseptic, fragrant, refreshing and inexpensive, eh? God will thank you for this, Mohun. As
for those worthless sons of mine–” Bhandat smiled. “Come and let me kiss you before you go,
Mohun.”
Mr. Biswas smiled, left Bhandat hooting, and went behind the screen to say good-bye to the
woman. A lighted coal-pot stood on a box; on another box there were vegetables and plates. A basin
of dirty water rested on the wet, black floor.
He said, “I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”
The woman nodded.
“Is his back, really.”
The words were low but clear. She was not dumb!
He did not wait for an explanation. He hurried out of the room into the lane. It was chokingly
warm. Once more he received the shock of the street’s hot smells. The bees, honey-makers, buzzed
around the exporters’ sweating sugarsacks. Bits of the coarse cake were still between his teeth. He
swallowed. Instandy his mouth filled with saliva again.
As soon as he got to the house he went to the old bookcase, dug past his newspaper clippings,
his correspondence from the Ideal School, a nest of pink blind baby mice, and took out his
unfinished Escape stories, the dreams of the barren heroine. He took the stories to the lavatory in
the yard and stayed there for some time, creating a din of his own, pulling the chain again and
again. When he came out there was a little queue of readers and learners, impatient but interested.
On Sundays the din of the readers and learners was at its peak, and Mr. Biswas started once
more to take his children on visits to Pagotes. But now he spent little time with them when they got
there. Jagdat, like a vicious schoolboy eager to corrupt, was always anxious to get Mr. Biswas out
of the house, and Mr. Biswas was always willing. Between Jagdat and Mr. Biswas there had
developed an easy, relaxing relationship. They had never quarrelled; they could never be friends;
yet each was always pleased to see the other. Neither believed or was interested in what the other
said, and did not feel obliged even to listen. Mr. Biswas liked, too, to be with Jagdat in Pagotes, for
once outside the house Jagdat was a person of importance, Ajodha’s heir, and his manner was that
of someone used to obedience and affection. Despite his age, his family, his premature, attractive
grey hair, Jagdat was still treated as the young man for whom allowances had to be made. His main
pleasure lay in breaking Ajodha’s rules, and for a few hours Mr. Biswas had to pretend that these
rules applied to him as well. Smoking was forbidden: they began to smoke as soon as they were in
the road. Drinking was forbidden, and on Sunday mornings rumshops were closed by law: therefore
they drank. Jagdat had an arrangement with a rum-shop-keeper who, in return for free petrol from
Ajodha’s pumps, offered the use of his drawingroom for this Sunday morning drinking. In this
drawingroom, which was strangely respectable, with four highly polished morris chairs around a
small table, Mr. Biswas and Jagdat drank whisky and soda. In the beginning they were young men,
for whom the world was still new, and neither mentioned the affections to which he had that day to
return. But there always came a time when, after a silence, with each willing the talk to continue as
before, anxieties and affections returned. Jagdat mentioned his family; he spoke their names: they
became individuals. Mr. Biswas spoke about the Sentinel , about Anand and the exhibition. And
always at the end the talk turned to Ajodha. Mr. Biswas heard old and new stories of Ajodha’s
selfishness and cruelty; again and again he heard how it was Bhandat who had made Ajodha’s early
success possible. Distrustful of the family, despite the drink, Mr. Biswas listened and made no
comments, only squeezing in words about the Tulsis from time to time, half-heartedly trying to
suggest that he had suffered as grand a betrayal as Bhandat. One Sunday morning he told Jagdat
about his visit to Bhandat.
“Ah! So you see the old man then, Mohun? How he keeping? Tell me, he say anything about
that bloodsucking hog?”
This was clearly Ajodha. Mr. Biswas, looking down at his glass as though deeply moved,
shook his head.
“You see the sort of man he is, Mohun. No malice.”
Mr. Biswas drank some whisky. “He tell me that none of you does go to see him or give him a
little help or anything. “
After a pause Jagdat said, “Son of a bitch lying like hell. That old bitch he living with smart
too, you know. She always putting him up to something or the other.”
Thereafter Jagdat never spoke of Bhandat, and Mr. Biswas resolved only to listen.
At these sessions Jagdat gave every indication of growing drunk. Mr. Biswas nearly always
became drunk, and when they left the rumshop-keeper’s drawingroom they sometimes decided to
break more rules. They went to Ajodha’s garage, filled one of Ajodha’s vans or lorries with
Ajodha’s petrol and drove to the river or the beach. Jagdat drove very fast, but with acute
judgement; and it was a recurring mortification to Mr. Biswas to find that as soon as they got back
to Ajodha’s Jagdat became quite sober. He said that he had been out on some business, described
conversations and incidents with an abundance of inconsequential, credible detail, and talked
happily all through lunch. Mr. Biswas said little and moved with a slow precision. His children
noted his bloodshot eyes and wondered what had happened to subdue the vivacity he had shown
earlier that morning in the bus-station in Port of Spain.
At lunch Ajodha invariably spoke to Mr. Biswas of his business problems. “They didn’t give
me that contract, you know, Mohun. I think you should write an article about these Local Road
Board contracts.” And: “Mohun, they are not giving me a permit to import diesel lorries. Can you
find out why? Will you write them a letter for me? I am sure the oil companies are behind it. Why
don’t you write an article about it, Mohun?” And there and then followed the looking at official
forms, correspondence, illustrated booklets from American firms, with Mr. Biswas adopting a
side-sitting attitude, breathing away from Ajodha, mumbling inanities through half-closed lips
about the war and restrictions.
When the children asked Mr. Biswas what was wrong he complained of his indigestion; and
sometimes he slept through the afternoon. He did get indigestion too: his increased consumption of
Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, his silence, his unquenchable thirst were symptoms which
Shama came to understand, to her shame.
So the children often found themselves on their own at Pagotes. There was only Tara to
welcome them, and she was now crippled by asthma. In the large, well-equipped, empty house only
the antagonism between Ajodha and his nephews could be felt. Anything could lead to a quarrel:
the pronunciation of “Iraq”, a discussion of the merits of the Buick. As quarrels became more
frequent they became shorter, but so violent and obscene it seemed impossible that uncle and
nephews could ever speak to one another again. Yet in a few minutes Ajodha would come out of his
room, his glasses on, papers in his hand, and there would be normal talk and even laughter. Ajodha
was bound to his nephews, and they to him. Ajodha needed his nephews in his business, since he
distrusted strangers; he needed them more in his house, since he feared to be alone. And Jagdat and
Rabidat, with large unacknowledged families, with no money, no gifts, and no status except that
they derived from Ajodha’s protection, knew that they were tied to Ajodha for as long as he lived.
Rabidat, of the beautiful, exposed body, seemed to have his prognathous mouth perpetually set for a
snarl. Jagdat’s giggles could turn in a moment to screams and tears. In Ajodha’s presence he was
always on the verge of hysteria: it showed in his small unsteady eyes, which always belied his
hearty, back-slapping manner.
More and more the children felt like intruders. They became aware of their status. And they
were eventually humiliated.
In response to a plea from Aunt Juanita of the Guardian Tinymites League, Anand had gone
around with a blue card collecting money for Polish refugee children. He had collected from
teachers, the school caretaker, shopkeepers, and even from W. C. Tuttle. The cashier at the Dairies
in Port of Spain had given six cents and congratulated him for undertaking good works while yet so
young. And in the back verandah at Pagotes one Sunday morning, after he had read out an article on
the importance of breathing, he presented the blue card to Ajodha and asked for a contribution.
Ajodha bunched his eyebrows and looked offended.
“You are a funny sort of family,” Ajodha said. “Father collecting money for destitutes. You
collecting for Polish refugees. Who collecting for you?”
It was a long time before Anand went back to Ajodha’s. He collected no more money for
Polish refugees, tore up the card. The money he had collected melted away, and for some months he
lived in the dread of being summoned by Aunt Juanita to account for it. The kindness he received
every afternoon from the woman in the Dairies was like a pain.
These Sunday excursions, mornings of makebelieve, afternoons and evenings of distress,
grew less frequent, and Mr. Biswas found himself more fully occupied with his campaigns at home.
To combat W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone Chinta and Govind had been giving a series of pious
singings from the Ramayana . The study of the Ramayana , which Chinta had started many years
before, while Mr. Biswas still lived at Green Vale, was now apparently complete; she sang very
well. Govind sang less mellifluously: he partly whined and partly grunted, from his habit of singing
while lying on his belly. Caught in this crossfire of song, which sometimes lasted a whole evening,
Mr. Biswas, listening, listening, would on a sudden rush in pants and vest to the inner room and
bang on the partition of Govind’s room and bang on the partition of W. C. Tuttle’s drawingroom.
The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled
between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song: the Ramayana singer is free to add his
own rubric in sound between couplets. Sometimes, however, he interrupted his singing to shout
insulting things through the partition. Mr. Biswas shouted back, and then Shama had to run upstairs
to silence Mr. Biswas.
Govind had become the terror of the house. It was as if his long spells in his taxi with his back
to his passengers had turned him into a complete misanthrope, as if his threepiece suits had
buttoned up whatever remained of his eagerness and loyalty and turned it into a brooding which was
liable to periodic sour eruptions. He had suffered a corresponding physical change. His weak
handsome face had become gross and unreadable, and since he had taken to driving a taxi his body
had lost its hardness and broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity, to
suggest that the swelling flesh is under control. His behaviour was odd and unpredictable. The
Ramayana singing had taken nearly everyone by surprise, and would have been amusing if it
hadn’t coincided with several displays of violence. For days he noticed nobody; then, without
provocation, he fastened his attention on someone and pursued him with childish taunts and a
frightening smile. He insulted Shama and the children; Shama, appreciating the limitations of Mr.
Biswas’s hammock-like muscles, bore these insults in silence. He made a number of surprise
assaults on Basdai’s readers and learners and generally terrorized them. Appeals to Chinta were
useless; the fear Govind inspired was to her a source of pride. The story how Govind had once
thrashed Mr. Biswas she passed on to her children, and they passed it on to the readers and learners,
terrifying them utterly.
A quarrel between Govind and Mr. Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel
between their children downstairs.
Once Savi said, “I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.”
Govind’s eldest daughter replied, “If some people could put money where their mouth is they
would be living in palaces.”
“Some people only have mouth and belly.”
“Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.”
Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner
room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she
could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.
In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength
matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the
garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr. Biswas had something in common: they
both felt that by marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded
himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered
he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its
art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one,
contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.
And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between
Mr. Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the
torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr.
Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its
lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr.
Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two morris
rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr. Biswas
had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the Guardian Tinymites
League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts
were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr. Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki
shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and
hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr. Biswas suffered a further setback
when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. “Take out
one too?” Mr. Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. “If I start paying insurance every month, you think
any of you would live to draw it?”
The picture war started when Mr. Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and
framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean
cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw
the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was
transformed. Framing a picture was like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could
concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were
as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.
W. C. Turtle began with a series of photographs, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one
photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except
for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated
with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod
foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were
photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in
a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C.
Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C.
Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had
made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court
dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass
jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In
between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a
photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled “When Did You Last See Your Father?” It
was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.
But Govind, taxi-driving, Ramayana –grunting, remained untouched by this or any other
rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished
that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his
hand shaken by the mayor of Port of Spain. This appeared to free him of all inhibitions, and both
Basdai and Mr. Biswas began to talk of calling in the police.
But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.
An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped
buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The Ramayana singing broke off in mid-couplet.
And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.
Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr. Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, “Daddy is
beating Mummy.”
Mr. Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s
Mummy.
The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind
resumed whining out the Ramayana , the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound,
and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.
So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners
recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave
Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had
the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.
Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but
Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on
the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was
surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other.
Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of
milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the
receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again,
get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen.
Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to
leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy
considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting,
tangled, multifarious relationships in that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became
historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that he
had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two
Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not
looking at one another, never speaking.
Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes,
began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.
“My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.”
“Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of Singing
Guns .” This from a young Tuttle.
“Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of Singing Guns .”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah-ah-ah!”
“But how you could expect him to know that?” Myna said. “He does only read books of
common sense.”
“Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother write a book. A whole book. And he
writing another right now.”
The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents
by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was
making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of Nelson’s West Indian Geography , by
Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author of Nelson’s West Indian Readers and Nelson’s
West Indian Arithmetics . He had completed the Geography in more than a dozen exercise books,
and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of Nelson’s West Indian History , by Captain
Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.
With the exhibition examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work.
Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given
in the afternoon for an hour after school; private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday
morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take
private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from
school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him
with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half
past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.
All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but
they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most
carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But
most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded,
giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden
hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed
the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early
November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these
conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He
knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen
all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry.
Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite
of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a
pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.
The talk turned one Monday lunchtime to films, and it appeared that nearly every boy who
lived in Port of Spain had been to see the double programme at the London Theatre over the
week-end: Jesse James and The Return of Frank James .
“What a double!” the boys exclaimed. “A major double!”
Anand, whose championship of Whitstable had established him as the holder of the perverse
opinion, said he didn’t care for it.
The boys rounded on him.
Anand, who had not seen the double, repeated that he didn’t care for it. “Give me When the
Daltons Rode and The Daltons Ride Again . Any day, old man.”
It was just his luck for one boy to say then, “I bet you he didn’t go to see it! You could see
that old crammer going to a theatre?”
“You are a hypocritical little thug,” Anand said, using two words he had got from his father.
“You are a bigger crammer than me.”
The boy wished to shift the conversation: he was a tremendous crammer. He repeated, less
warmly, “I bet you didn’t go.” By now, however, the other boys had prepared to listen, and the
accuser, gaining confidence, said, “All right-all right. He went. Just let him tell me what happened
when Henry Fonda–”
Anand said, “I don’t like Henry Fonda.”
This created a minor diversion.
“How you mean, you don’t like Fonda. Anybody would think that you never see Fonda
walk.”
“That is walk, old man.”
“All right-all right,” the accuser went on. “What happened when Henry Fonda and Brian
Donlevy–”
“I don’t like him either,” Anand said. And, to his great relief, the bell rang.
He could tell from the annoyance of his accuser that the cross-examination would be
continued. He went straight after school to the Dairies; when he came back it was time for private
lessons; and after private lessons he managed to slip away to the headmaster’s. When he got home
he said he could do no work that evening and wanted to go to the London Theatre, to give his brain
a rest.
“I have no money,” Shama said. “You will have to ask your father.”
Mr. Biswas said, “When you get to my age you wouldn’t care for Westerns.”
Anand lost his temper. “When I get to your age I don’t want to be like you.”
He regretted what he had said. He was, indeed, fatigued; and Mr. Biswas’s dismissing manner
had seemed to him callous. But he made no apology. He talked instead about the headaches he was
getting and said he was sure he was suffering from brainfag and brainfever, crammer’s afflictions,
which his rivals at school had often prophesied for him.
Mr. Biswas said, “I haven’t got a red cent on me. I don’t get pay till the day after tomorrow.
Right now I am dipping into the Deserving Destees’ petty cash at the office. Go and ask your
mother.”
As usual, it turned out that she did have some money. “How much you want?”
Anand calculated. Adult, twelve cents, children, half price. Just to make sure, however, he
said, “Thirty-six cents.” He would return the change afterwards.
“Thirty-six cents. Well, boy, you clean me out. Look.”
All he saw in her purse were a few coppers. But she always managed. And pay day was the
day after tomorrow.
The evening show began at half past eight. Mr. Biswas and Anand left the house at about
eight. Not far from the cinema there was a Chinese caf . Something had to be bought there; it was
part of the cinema ritual. They had eighteen cents to spend. They bought peanuts, channa and some
mint sweets, six cents in all.
The entrance to the London pit was through a narrow tunnel, as to a dungeon of romance. It
allowed not more than one person to advance at a time and enabled the ticket-collector, who sat at
the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to repel gate-crashers. Mr. Biswas and
Anand arrived to find the mouth of the tunnel blocked by a turbulent, unaccommodating mob. They
stood hesitantly at the edge of the mob, and in an instant, driven from behind, found themselves part
of it. They lost control of their hands and feet. Anand, wedged between tall men, shut off from light
and air, could only allow himself to be carried along. Cries of frustration and anguish ran through
the mob: the film had started: they could hear the opening music. The pressure on Anand increased;
he feared he would be crushed against the angle of wall and tunnel; Mr. Biswas called to him in a
voice that seemed to come from far; he could not answer; he could not look up or down. There was
only the thought that at the end of this lay Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy and Tyrone Power, all
of whom, despite what he had said at school, commanded Anand’s highest esteem. He heard men
crying for tickets; they were getting near. Through a small, semicircular, lighted hole in the wall of
the tunnel money was being pushed in, tickets out, and the hands of the ticketseller occasionally
flashed: a woman’s hands, fat and cool.
It was Mr. Biswas’s turn. Struggling to remain in front of the hole, to prevent himself being
swept down, ticketless, to the ticket-collector with the stick, he placed a shilling on the smooth,
shining wood. “One and a half
A woman’s voice said, “Half price only at matinee.” The hands, about to tear a ticket from the
reel, waited.
“Two, then.”
Two green tickets were pushed towards him, and he and Anand yielded gratefully to the
pressure at their backs.
“Hey, you!” the woman’s voice called from the hole.
Selling had stopped, and the clamour redoubled all down the tunnel.
“You!”
Mr. Biswas went back to the lighted hole.
“What you mean, giving me only a shilling?” The coin lay on her palm.
“Two twelves.”
“Two twenties. Sixteen cents more.”
Anand stood where he was. The turmoil and the shouting became remote.
The soundtrack indicated that a fire was in progress. People who had seen the film before
recognized the sound; it wound them up to a frenzy.
How could he have forgotten that there was half price only at matinees? How could he have
forgotten that on Mondays as on Saturdays and Sundays, the price was not twelve cents, but
twenty?
Mr. Biswas put the two green tickets down. One was torn off and given back to him, with four
cents.
They stood against the wall next to the ticket-collector, while the men who had been behind
them hurried past, rearranging their disordered clothes.
“You go,” Mr. Biswas said.
Anand’s cheeks bulged over the mint sweet. He had stopped sucking it; it felt cold and wet.
He shook his head. Shock had taken away all desire to see the films; if he stayed he would have to
walk home alone at midnight.
They were continually jostled. They were in the way.
Mr. Biswas said, “I’ll come back for you.”
Anand hesitated. But at that moment there was a new scramble up the tunnel; someone
shouted, “Why the hell you don’t go if you going?”; the ticket-collector said, “Make up your mind.
You blocking the way.” And Anand said to Mr. Biswas, “You go,” and Mr. Biswas, appearing to
obey instantly, vanished behind many backs and was propelled into the cinema to see films he
hadn’t wanted to see.
Anand stayed in the tunnel, pressed flat against the wall, while people passed inside.
Presently, with the film well advanced, the tunnel was empty. The distempered ochre walls were
rubbed shiny. In the lighted hole the hands were knitting.
He walked past the Woodbrook Market Square, the Chinese caf , the Murray Street
playground. The house, when he returned to it, was humming. But no one saw him. He went
straight to the front room, took off his shoes and lay down on the Slumberking.
There Shama found him when she came upstairs and turned on the light.
“Boy! You had me frightened. You didn’t go to the theatre?”
“Yes. But I had a headache.”
“And your father?”
“He is there.”
The front gate clicked, and someone came up the concrete steps. The door opened and they
saw Mr. Biswas.
“Well!” Shama said. “You had a headache too?”
He didn’t answer. He worked his way between table and bed, and sat on the bed.
“I can’t understand the pair of you,” Shama said. She went into the inner room, came out with
some sewing and went downstairs.
Mr. Biswas said, “Boy, get me the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare . And my pen.”
Anand climbed over the head of the bed and got the book and the pen.
For some time Mr. Biswas wrote.
“Blasted thing blot like hell. But, still, read it.”
On the fly-leaf, below the four masculine names that had been chosen for Savi before she was
born, Anand read: “I , Mohun Biswas, do hereby promise my son Anand Biswas that in the event of
his winning a College Exhibition, I will buy him a bicycle .” Signature and date followed.
Mr. Biswas said, “I think you’d better witness it.”
Anand wrote the latest version of his signature and added “witness” in brackets.
“All fair and square now,” Mr. Biswas said. “Just a minute though. Let me see the book again.
I think I left out something.”
He took the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare , changed the full stop of his declaration into a
comma and added, war conditions permitting .
In the house the eruptions of sound had ceased. The humming had subsided to a low, steady
burr. It was late. Shama and Savi came up and went to the inner room, where Myna and Kamla
were already asleep. Anand lay down on the Slumberking, separated from Mr. Biswas by a bank of
pillows. He pulled the cotton sheet over his face to keep out the light, and soon fell asleep. Mr.
Biswas stayed awake for some time, reading. Then he got up, turned off the light, and felt his way
back to the bed.
He awoke, as nearly always now, when it was still night. He never wished to know the time: it
would be too early or too late. The house was full of sound: with renters, readers and learners
upstairs and downstairs, the house snored. The world was without colour; it awaited no one’s
awakening. Through the open window, above the silhouette of trees and the roof of the house next
door, he could see the deep starlit sky. It magnified his distress. Anguish quickened to panic, the
familiar knot in his stomach.
He slept late next morning; bathed in the open-air bathroom, ate in the sunny front room, put
on yesterday’s shirt (he wore one shirt for two days), wrist-watch, tie, jacket, hat; and, respectably
attired, cycled out to interview destitutes.
And at school, when confronted by his accuser, Anand said, “Of course I went. But I hated it
so much I left before it began.”
It was agreed that it was a characteristic remark.
Anand’s attacks of asthma occurred at intervals of four weeks or less, and Mr. Biswas and
Shama feared that he might get one during the week of the exhibition examination. But the attack
came in the week before, ran for its three days, and then, his chest discoloured and peeling from the
medicated wadding, Anand was free to attend to his last, intensive private lessons. His labours were
increased when Mr. Biswas, determined to leave as little as possible to chance, wrote essays on the
Grow More Food Campaign and the Red Cross and made Anand commit them to memory, Mr.
Biswas flattering himself that he had concealed his own personality in these essays and made them
the work, not of a dissident adult, but of a brilliant and loyal schoolboy. They were as full of noble
sentiments as a Sentinel leader; they appealed urgently for support for campaign and society; they
said that the war had to be won, to preserve those free institutions which Anand dearly loved.
The examination was on a Saturday. On Friday evening Shama laid out Anand’s speechday
clothes and all his equipment. Anand, objecting to the clothes, said it was like preparing for a puja .
And Chinta, who had kept her plans secret, did have a little puja for Vidiadhar. A pundit came up
from Arwacas on his motorbike on Friday evening and spent the night among the readers and
learners below the house. On Saturday morning, while Anand was doing a last-minute revision,
Vidiadhar bathed in consecrated water, put on a dhoti and faced the pundit across a sacrificial fire.
He listened to the pundit’s prayers, burned some ghee and chipped coconut and brown sugar, and
the readers and learners rang bells and struck gongs.
Anand did not escape ritual himself. He had to wear the dark-blue serge shorts, the white
shirt, the unchewed school tie; and Shama, braving his anger, sprinkled his shirt with lavender water
when he wasn’t looking. He said he was willing to rely on the clock in the school hall, but he was
given Mr. Biswas’s Cyma wrist-watch; it hung on his wrist like a loose bracelet and had to be
pulled down to his forearm. He was given Mr. Biswas’s pen, in case his own should fail. He was
given a large new bottle of ink, in case the examiners didn’t provide enough. He was given many
blotters, many Sentinel pencils, a pencil sharpener, a ruler, and two erasers, one for pencil, one for
ink. He said, “Anybody would believe I am going to this place to get married.” Lastly, Shama gave
him two shillings. She didn’t say what this was a precaution against, and he didn’t ask.
Similar attentions were being bestowed on a simpering, lip-licking Vidiadhar; he was also
provided by Chinta with many charms, which were put on under the pundit’s supervision and with
ostentatious secrecy, after much shooing away of curious readers and learners. At last the boys left
for the school, both smelling of lavender, Vidiadhar going in his father’s taxi, Anand walking,
accompanied by Mr. Biswas, who wheeled his Royal Enfield bicycle. Halfway down the street
Anand put his hand in his trousers pocket and felt something soft, small and round. It was a dry
lime. It must have been put there by Shama, to cut bad luck. He threw it into the gutter.
It was as Anand feared. The exhibition candidates, prepared for years for the sacrificial day,
had all come dressed for the sacrifice. They all wore serge shorts, white shirts and school ties, and
Anand could only guess at what charms these clothes concealed. Their pockets were stuffed with
pens and pencils. In their hands they carried blotters, rulers, erasers and new pots of ink; some
carried complete cases of mathematical instruments; many wore wrist-watches. The schoolyard was
full of Daddies, the heroes of so many English compositions; they seemed to have dressed with as
much care as their sons. The boys looked at the Daddies; and the Daddies, wrist-watchless, eyed
each other, breeders of rivals. There were few cars outside the school and Vidiadhar had achieved a
temporary glory when he arrived in his father’s car. But Govind hadn’t left quickly enough and the
boys, skilled in noticing such things, saw the H on the number plate which indicated that the car
was for hire. Altogether it was a dreadful day, a day of reckoning, with Daddies exposed to scrutiny
on every side, and the examination to follow.
Anand wanted Mr. Biswas to go at once. Not that Mr. Biswas couldn’t withstand scrutiny; but
no boy with an anxious father at his side could pretend that he didn’t care about the examination,
and Anand wanted passionately to give that impression. Mr. Biswas submitted and left, thinking
about the ingratitude and callousness of children. Anand joined the fatherless boys who, for the
benefit of the Daddies, were making an exaggerated show of being schoolboys: they shouted,
bullied the bullied, called each other by nicknames, and laughed noisily at stale, but private,
classroom jokes. Loudly they discussed the football match that was to take place that afternoon in
the Savannah, just at the end of the street; many said they were going to watch it. One brave soul
talked about the film he had seen the night before. They talked, their sweating hands staining
blotters, rulers, and slipping over ink-bottles; and they waited.
When the bell rang the schoolyard was instantly stilled. Shouts were suspended, sentences
hung unfinished. The traffic on Tragarete Road could be heard, the din from the kitchens of the
Queen’s Park Hotel. A fluttering of white shirts; newly polished shoes pattering on the asphalt
quadrangle and grating up the concrete steps; a wavering line of blue serge at every door;
unemphatic footsteps in the hall; here and there a defiant banging of a desk-lid. Then silence. And
the Daddies, alone in the schoolyard, looked at the hall doors.
Slowly they dispersed. Three hours later they began to reassemble, their clothes hanging a
little more loosely, their faces shining. Many carried oilstained paper parcels. They stood in the
shade of buildings and trees and stared at the hall doors. A self-possessed invigilator in shirtsleeves
walked slowly up and down, sheets of paper in his hand; from time to time he coughed noiselessly
into a loosely-clenched fist. A car stopped not far from the school gates; the middle-aged driver
lounged in the angle of seat and door, rested a newspaper on the steering-wheel and read, picking
his nose.
Then a hamper appeared. A wicker basket with the edges of an ironed white napkin peeping
out below the flaps. A uniformed maid held the hamper in the crook of her arm and waited in the
shade of the tree next to the caretaker’s house, ignoring the glances of the Daddies with oilstained
paper parcels.
More cars came. Mr. Biswas, fresh from writing up the sensational decline and fall of a
destitute for the Sunday Sentinel , arrived on his Royal Enfield. Yielding to a habit he had formed
since frequenting destitutes, he chained the bicycle to the school rails. He walked into the
schoolyard with his bicycle clips still on: they gave him an urgent, athletic air.
Two more hampers came. Their carriers, one in uniform, one in a black cotton frock, stood
next to the other hamper carrier.
Govind came. His mood had changed since the morning. He slammed the door of his taxi
hard and paced up and down outside the school gates, smiling at the pavement, humming, his hands
behind his back.
A flutter as of pigeons in the hall: papers being collected. A steady and prolonged banging of
desk-lids, a shuffling and a scraping, footsteps more assertive than in the morning, a disorderly rash
of white shirts, many broken lines of blue serge: as though the disciplined battalion of a few hours
before had been routed and were retreating hurriedly, their equipment abandoned. And the Daddies
advanced, like people welcoming a train, some purposefully, claiming their own, some getting lost
in the eddies of white and dark blue, and hesitating.
Even in this disorder the hampers were noted, and two provided surprises, for their recipients
were mild mannered and insignificant; they were now being bullied by maids and led to classrooms.
Everywhere Daddies were getting reports. Question papers were displayed, inkstained fingers
pointed. Already, too, backs were being turned, and brown paper parcels and white paper parcels
unwrapped and furtively explored.
Mr. Biswas saw Vidiadhar first: running down the steps, a lime bulging clearly in each trouser
pocket, clothes a little battered, but a face as gay and as fresh and as unstained as when he went in.
The little thug. He joined a group of fatherless who had gathered around the class-teacher. No
longer posing for the Daddies or one another, they were anxious, excited and shrill.
Anand avoided them when he came out. The pen Mr. Biswas had lent him, just in case, had
leaked in his shirt pocket and left a large wet stain: it was as though his heart had bled ink. His hair
was disordered, his lips black and moustached with ink, his cheeks and forehead smudged. His face
was drawn; he looked dejected, exhausted and irritable.
“Well,” Mr. Biswas said, smiling, his heart sinking. “It went all right?”
“Take your bicycle clips off!”
Stunned by the boy’s vehemence, Mr. Biswas obeyed.
Anand handed him the question papers, clumsily folded, already dirty. Mr. Biswas began
opening them.
“Oh, put it in your pocket,” Anand said, and Mr. Biswas obeyed again.
A worried Chinese boy, looking irreparably scruffy, with over-broad and over-long serge
trousers napping below thin knees, left the group around the teacher and came up to them. In one
small hand he unashamedly held a large cheese sandwich, far too thick, it would have seemed, for
his narrow mouth; but one end of the sandwich was already irregularly pinked. In the other hand he
had a bottle of aerated water. His shrunken face was distorted with anxiety: sandwich and aerated
water were irrelevant.
“Biswas,” he said, paying no attention to Mr. Biswas. “That sum about the cyclist–”
“Oh, don’t bother me,” Anand said.
Mr. Biswas smiled apologetically at the boy, but the boy didn’t notice. Daddyless, he
wandered off, alone with his anxieties, no one to assure him that his answer was right, the teacher’s
wrong.
“You shouldn’t behave like that,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Here. Take back your pen.”
Mr. Biswas took back his pen. It dripped with ink.
“And your wrist-watch.” Anand was anxious to get rid of every reminder of the morning’s
preparations.
Govind and Vidiadhar had gone. So had the other cars. The yard was less noisy. Mr. Biswas
took Anand to the Dairies for lunch. Crowded with boys and their fathers, it had become an
unfamiliar place. As a treat Anand had a chocolate drink instead of milk; but he didn’t enjoy that or
anything else: it was only part of the day’s sacrificial ritual.
The schoolyard filled again. Cars came back, deposited boys, and left. The hampers and the
maids left. When the bell rang there was not the instant and complete silence of the morning: there
was chatter, shuffling and banging, dwindling to silence.
Mr. Biswas opened Anand’s question papers. The arithmetic paper was filled in its margins
with crabbed and frantic figures: fractions being reduced, and many little multiplications, some
completed, some abandoned. Mr. Biswas didn’t like the look of them. Then he saw that on the
geography paper Anand had written his initials elaborately, outlining them in pencil, shading them
in pencil; and this dismayed him entirely.
The afternoon session was shorter, and at the end of it few Daddies were in the schoolyard.
Only one car came. The drama of the day was over. There was no rush out of the hall. The boys
took off their ties, folded them and put them in their shirt pockets with the broad end hanging out (a
recent fashion). An invigilator, in a dingy jacket and bicycle clips, brought his rickety bicycle down
the steps: no longer remote and awesome, only a man going home after work.
Anand, his tie in his shirt pocket, his collar turned up, ran smiling to Mr. Biswas. “Look!” he
said, showing the English paper.
One of the essay subjects was the Grow More Food Campaign.
They smiled at each other, conspirators.
“Biswas!” a boy called. “You coming to the Savannah?”
“Yes, man!”
He ran to join the boys; and Mr. Biswas, loaded with the pen and pencils, the ruler and erasers
and bottle of ink, cycled home.
It was strange that, having talked about football and racing all through the term, the boys
should now, watching an important football match, talk about nothing but the examination.
Anand returned home shortly after nightfall. His serge trousers were dusty, his shirt wet with
perspiration, and he was very gloomy.
“I’ve failed,” he said.
“What happened?” Mr. Biswas asked.
“In the spelling paper. The synonyms and homonyms. They were so easy I thought I’d leave
them for last. Then I just didn’t do them.”
“You mean you left out a whole question?”
“I realized it in the Savannah.”
The gloom spread to Savi and Myna and Kamla and Shama, and was deepened by the joy of
Vidiadhar’s brothers and sisters. Vidiadhar had been untouched by the day’s events, and was at that
moment in the Roxy Theatre, seeing the complete serial of Daredevils of the Red Circle . He had
brought home question papers that were quite clean except for gay ticks at the side of those
questions he had answered. His arithmetic answers, neatly written on a strip of paper, were all
correct. He had known the meanings of all the difficult words; he had spotted the synonyms and had
not been fooled by one homonym. And he had not had private lessons. He had not had private
lessons after private lessons. No one had taken him Ovaltine and sandwiches at five. He had not
been going for very long to a Port of Spain school; he had drunk little milk and eaten few prunes.
“I always say,” Shama said, though she had never said anything of the sort, “I always say that
carelessness was going to be your downfall.”
“In a few years you will look back on this and laugh,” Mr. Biswas said. “You did your best.
And no true effort is ever wasted. Remember that.”
“What about you?” Anand said.
And though they slept on the same bed, neither spoke to the other for the rest of the evening.
Anand had no more work to do that year and no more milk to drink, but on Monday he went
to school. All Saturday’s candidates were there. They had become a superior, leisured caste. A few
boys did spend the day writing the examination as nearly as possible as they had done on Saturday.
(The Chinese boy, with a mortification that amounted almost to terror, got the correct answer to the
sum about the cyclist.) The others flaunted their idleness. At first they were content to be in the
classroom and not of the class, seeing the exhibition discipline enforced on next year’s candidates.
But this soon palled, and they wandered out into the yard. Their attitude to the examination had
changed since Saturday afternoon: they all now had tales of disaster. Anand, believing none of
them, magnified his own blunder. In the end they were all boasting of how badly they had done; and
apparently none of them really cared. Time hung heavily on their hands, and the afternoon was only
partially enlivened by a packet of cigarettes: disappointing, but a prank, at last. For the first time for
many years Anand was free to go home as soon as the afternoon bell rang. Up to last week this had
seemed the supreme freedom. But now he dreaded leaving the boys, dreaded going back to the
house. He did not get home till six.
Unusually, Mr. Biswas was below the house, in that section of it which Shama used as a
kitchen. He was in his working clothes, and tired, but very gay.
“Ah, the young man himself,” he greeted Anand. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve got
something for you, young man.” He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket.
It was a letter from an English judge. He said he had been following Mr. Biswas’s work in the
Sentinel , admired it, and would like to meet Mr. Biswas, to try and persuade him to join a literary
group he had formed.
“What about me, eh. What about me. I tell you, man, no true effort is wasted. Not that I
expect to get anything from that blasted paper. Or from you.”
Mr. Biswas’s elation was extravagant. Anand thought he knew why. But he was in no mood
to give comfort, to associate himself with weakness. He handed back the letter to Mr. Biswas
without a word.
Mr. Biswas took the letter absently, told Shama to send up his food, and went to the front
room. He was alone, too, when he awoke in the night to the snoring house, Anand asleep beside
him, and looked through the window at the clear, dead sky.
He saw the judge the next day, and went to the meeting of the literary group on Friday
evening. He was especially glad to be out of the house then, for on Friday evenings the widows
came up from Shorthills and spent the night below the house. Encouraged by the success of Indian
shirtmakers, the widows had decided to go into the clothesmaking business. Since none of the five
could sew at all well, they had decided to learn, and every Friday they went to the sewing classes at
the Royal Victoria Institute, each widow specializing in a different aspect of the craft. They came in
the late afternoon, they were rapturously welcomed by the readers and learners, and Basdai fed
them. The readers and learners, not subject to Basdai’s floggings while their mothers were present,
were unusually vociferous; there was an air of festival.
Mr. Biswas found himself a little out of his depth in the literary group. Apart from the poems
in the Royal Reader and Bell’s Standard Elocutionist , the only poems he knew were those of Ella
Wheeler Wilcox and Edward Carpenter; and at the judge’s the emphasis was on poetry. But there
was much to drink, and it was late when Mr. Biswas came back and wheeled his bicycle below the
house, his head ringing with the names of Lorca and Eliot and Auden. The readers and learners
were asleep on benches and tables. The widows, dressed in white and singing softly, sat below a
weak bulb, playing cards, drinking coffee, and handling pieces of sewing which had grown grubby
over the weeks of tuition. He went up the dark front stairs and turned the light on in his room.
Anand sprawled on the bed behind the bank of pillows. He undressed and squeezed himself
between the diningtable and the bed. Shama came from the inner room, in answer to the light, and
noted those symptoms, of slowness, precision and silence, which she associated with his Sunday
excursions to Pagotes.
As a condition of his acceptance by the group he had to read something of his own. He didn’t
know what to offer them. He couldn’t write poetry, and he had thrown away the “Escape” stories.
He knew that story well, however; it could be written again. He still could think of no satisfactory
end, but he had read enough of modern prose to know that a neat end might offend the group. He
couldn’t make his hero the faceless “John Lubbard”, who was “tall, broad-shouldered, handsome”;
he would be laughed down. He had to be ruthless. His hero would be Gopi, a country shopkeeper,
“small, spare and shrunken”. He took a Sentinel pad, got into bed and, neatly, began to write the
familiar words: At the age of thirty-three , when he was already the father of four children…
Those words were never read to the group. This story, like the others, was never finished. For,
even before Gopi could meet his barren heroine, news came that Bipti, Mr. Biswas’s mother, had
died.
He called the children away from school and they went with Shama to Pratap’s. From the road
the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white. He had not
expected such a crowd. Tara was there, and Ajodha, looking annoyed. But most of the mourners he
didn’t know: the families of his sister-in-law, his brother’s friends, Bipti’s friends. He might have
been attending the funeral of a stranger. The body laid out in a coffin on the verandah belonged
more to them. He longed to feel grief. He was surprised only by jealousy.
Shama did her duty and wept. Dehuti, who had been ostracized since her marriage, sat
halfway up the steps, shrieking at new mourners and grabbing at their feet, as if anxious to trip them
up, to prevent them going any further. The mourners, finding their trousers or skirts clutched to a
wet face, stroked Dehuti’s covered head and at the same time tried to shake their garments free. No
one made any effort to move Dehuti. Her story was known, and it was felt that she was doing a
penance which it would have been improper to interrupt. Ramchand was more controlled but
equally impressive. He occupied himself with the funeral arrangements, and behaved with such
authority that no one would have guessed that he had not spoken to Bipti or Mr. Biswas’s brothers.
Mr. Biswas went past Dehuti to look at the body. Then he did not wish to see it again. But
always, as he wandered about the yard among the mourners, he was aware of the body. He was
oppressed by a sense of loss: not of present loss, but of something missed in the past. He would
have liked to be alone, to commune with this feeling. But time was short, and always there was the
sight of Shama and the children, alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him
away from that part of him which yet remained purely himself, that part which had for long been
submerged and was now to disappear.
The children did not go to the burial ground. They strayed about Pratap’s large yard, eyed
other groups of children, town children versus country children. Anand, in his exhibition clothes,
led his sisters through the vegetable garden to the cowpen. They examined a broken cartwheel.
Behind the pen they surprised a hen and its brood scratching a dung heap. Girls and chickens fled in
opposite directions, and the country children tittered.
Back in Port of Spain, they noticed Mr. Biswas’s stillness, his silence, his withdrawal. He did
not complain about the noise; he discouraged, but gently, all efforts to engage him in conversation;
he went alone for long night walks. He summoned no one to get his matches or cigarettes or books.
And he wrote. He told no one what he was writing. He wrote with energy but without enthusiasm,
doggedly, destroying sheet after sheet. He ate little, but his indigestion had gone. Shama bought him
tinned salmon, his favourite food; she had the girls clean his bicycle and made Anand pump the
tyres every morning. But he did not appear to notice these attentions.
She went to the front room one evening and stood at the head of the bed. He was writing; his
back was to her. She was in his light, but he did not shout.
“What’s the matter, man?”
He said in an expressionless voice, “You are blocking the light.” He laid down paper and
pencil.
She worked her way between the table and bed and sat on the edge of the bed, near his head.
Her weight created a minor disturbance. The pillow tilted and his head slipped off it, falling almost
into her lap. He tried to move his head, but when she held it he remained still.
“You don’t look well,” she said.
He accepted her caresses. She stroked his hair, remarked on its fine quality, said it was going
thin, but not, thank God, going grey like hers. She pulled out a hair from her head and laid it across
his chest. “Look,” she said, “completely grey,” laughing.
“Grey all right.”
She looked over his chest to the sheets he had put down. She saw My Dear Doctor , with the
My crossed out and written in again.
“Who you writing to?”
She couldn’t read more, for beyond the first line the handwriting had deteriorated into a
racing scrawl.
He didn’t reply.
For some time, until the position became uncomfortable for Shama, they remained like that,
silent. She stroked his head, looked from him to the open window, heard the buzz and shrieks
upstairs and downstairs. He closed his eyes and opened them under her stroking.
“Which doctor?” Though there had been a long silence, there seemed to be no break between
her questions.
He was silent.
Then he said, “Doctor Rameshwar.”
“The one who…”
“Yes. The one who signed my mother’s death certificate.”
She went on stroking his head, and, slowly, he began to speak.
There had been some trouble about the certificate. No, it wasn’t really trouble. Pratap had first
dispatched messages; Prasad had come and they had both gone, with urgent grief, to the doctor’s. It
was midday, hot; the body would not last. They had been made to wait for very long in the doctor’s
verandah; they had complained, and the doctor had damned them and damned their mother. His bad
temper continued all the way to the house; with anger and disrespect he had examined Bipti’s body,
signed the certificate, demanded his fee and left. This had been told to Mr. Biswas by his brothers,
not in anger; they told it simply as part of the tribulations of the day: the death, the sending of
messages, the arrangements.
“And why didn’t you tell me?” Shama asked in Hindi.
He didn’t say. It was something that concerned him alone. By speaking of it he would have
exposed himself to the disregard of Shama and the children; he would also have involved them in
his own humiliation.
Shama’s solace was a surprise. She spoke to the children, and he was further strengthened
when they expressed, not hurt, but anger.
He became almost gay, and addressed himself to the letter now with something like zest. He
read out to Anand the drafts he had made and asked for comments. The drafts were hysterical and
libellous. But in his new mood, and after many re-writings, the letter developed into a broad
philosophical essay on the nature of man. Both he and Anand thought it humorous, charitable and in
parts correctly condescending; and it thrilled them to think of the doctor’s surprise at receiving such
a letter from the relation of someone he had thought to be only a peasant. Mr. Biswas introduced
himself as the son of the woman whose death the doctor had so rudely certified. He compared the
doctor to an angry hero of a Hindu epic, and asked to be forgiven for mentioning the Hindu epics to
an Indian who had abandoned his religion for a recent superstition that was being exported
wholesale to savages all over the world (the doctor was a Christian). Perhaps the doctor had done so
for political reasons or social reasons, or simply to escape from his caste; but no one could escape
from what he was. This theme was developed and the letter concluded that no one could deny his
humanity and keep his selfrespect. Mr. Biswas and Anand hunted through the Collins Clear-Type
Shakespeare and found the play of Measure for Measure rich in things that could be quoted. They
also quoted from the New Testament and the Gita . The letter ran to eight pages. It was typed on the
yellow typewriter and posted; and Mr. Biswas, exhilarated by his fortnight’s work, said to Anand,
“How about a few more letters before Christmas? One to a business man. To fix up Shekhar. One to
an editor. Fix up the Sentinel . Publish them as a booklet. Dedicate it to you.”
But the wound was still there, too deep for anger or thoughts of retribution. What had
happened was locked away in time. But it was an error, not a part of truth. He wished this stated;
and he wanted to do something that would be a defiance of what had happened. The body, lying in
earth, was unhallowed, and he owed it honour: the mother who had remained unknown and whom
he had never loved. Waking in the night, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He longed for hands to
cover him all over, and he could only fall asleep again with his hands over his navel, unable to bear
the feel of any alien object, however slight, on that part of his body.
To do honour he had no gifts. He had no words to say what he wanted to say, the poet’s
words, which held more than the sum of their meanings. But awake one night, looking at the sky
through the window, he got out of bed, worked his way to the light switch, turned it on, got paper
and pencil, and began to write. He addressed his mother. He did not think of rhythm; he used no
cheating abstract words. He wrote of coming up to the brow of the hill, seeing the black, forked
earth, the marks of the spade, the indentations of the fork prongs. He wrote of a journey he had
made a long time before. He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she gave him food. He
had nowhere to go; she welcomed him. The writing excited, relieved him; so much so that he was
able to look at Anand, asleep beside him, and think, “Poor boy. Failed his exam.”
The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday
the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and
the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the
gramophone, Mr. Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going
to read his offering at last.
“It is a poem,” he said. “In prose.”
Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of
whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.
Mr. Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. “There is
no title,” he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.
Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his
poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the
paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking;
his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He
folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap,
as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in
his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the
children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.
Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr. Biswas and Shama decided. It
wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary
school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of
going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider
themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr. Biswas should make a public declaration that
Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the
exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful
subjects taught at the college.
The declaration was made, though neither Mr. Biswas nor Shama could say where the money
was going to come from.
Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.
“Where you going to keep it?” Mr. Biswas asked. “With the boarders downstairs?”
“Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,” Shama said.
“What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the
Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk
you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?”
Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing
of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from
Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered
him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to
the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no
outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were
adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as
grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.
The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the
house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr. Biswas’s dread of
being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.
With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the
destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one
morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir , Your letter awaited me on my return from
holiday…, a reporter came to his desk and said, “Congrats, old man.”
It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were
the exhibition results.
In a page of names the name stood out.
Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.
As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older
members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were
aloof and unimpressed.
But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be
grasped right away.
Recovering, Mr. Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. “Mark you, the teacher
knows his stuff.” But he couldn’t keep this up. “Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole
question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.”
He began to lose his audience.
“He knew them. Thought they were easy.”
Reporters returned to their desks.
“And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.”
After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes
with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the
education correspondent and Mr. Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the caf on the
corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three
men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the
achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr.
Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.
“You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,” he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet
house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. “What about oranges? Want to go in the selling
business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.”
The orange venture had in fact failed. Three oranges had been sold to a stray American soldier
for a penny; the others had gone bad in the sun. The failure was put down to the unsuitability of the
site and the snobbishness and jealousy of the neighbours who, to spite the widow, had preferred to
go all the way to the city market to buy their oranges at a higher price. The widow’s son was also
blamed for his lack of enthusiasm and his false pride: he had stood some distance from the tray of
oranges and tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with him.
When Mr. Biswas broke the news of the exhibition, Shama set about defending the widows,
and she and Mr. Biswas had a long and friendly squabble about the Tulsi family. It was like old
times, and Mr. Biswas, the victor as always, solaced Shama by saying, what he had forgotten for
some time, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.”
“I suppose it would look nice in my coffin.”
The school had taken the first four places and won seven of the twelve exhibitions. The
teacher’s notes and private lessons, legendarily virtuous, had triumphed once again. Five of the
exhibitions went to known crammers like Anand and the Chinese boy and aroused little comment.
The sixth went to one of the mild, hamper-fed boys; he was now considered sly. But the biggest
surprise was provided by the boy who had come first. He was a Negro boy of astonishing size. He
was a year younger than Anand but looked incomparably older. His forearms were already veined,
and his chin and cheeks were dotted with little springs of hair. He had been loud in his denunciation
of crammers; he had taken a leading part in discussions about films and sport; he had a phenomenal
knowledge of English county cricket scores throughout the nineteen-thirties; and he had introduced
the topic of sex. He claimed to have had many sexual encounters and his talk encouraged the belief
that when he left school after private lessons, his satchel bouncing off his high bottom, it was not to
do homework but to indulge in sexual intrigue and, joyously, to be pursued by older women. He
displayed a convincing knowledge of the female body and its functions; and the conception of his
life away from school as one of indifference to books and notes and homework was reinforced by
his passionate devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, whose style he successfully imitated in
his English compositions. His popularity was at its lowest that morning; his success cast doubt on
all his tales of sexual adventure. He protested that he had not worked, that he had done no more
than a hasty last-minute revision, and that the result had surprised him more than anyone else. But
he protested in vain.
Photographers from the newspapers came. The exhibitioners straightened their ties and were
photographed. Then they were free. They had ceased to be members of the school. School and
teacher dwindled, and the boys were anxious to be out of the yard. None dared say he wanted to go
home to break the news; besides, none wanted to put an end to the day.
The city was black and white in the sun. Trees were still, the sky high. They walked up to the
Savannah, sat and looked at the people going in and out of the Queen’s Park Hotel. In the
whitewashed bays on either side of the hotel entrance two doorkeepers of a rare blackness stood in
stiff snow-white tunics. The effect was severe but picturesque. The boys wondered aloud what
made the hotel get the blackest men in the island for that job, and what made the men take the job.
Then they had a long discussion whether, given such a blackness, they would take the job
themselves. The taxi-drivers, squatting on the asphalt pavement, chuckled; and the doorkeepers,
compelled because of the constant coming and going to maintain their statuesque pose, could only
make furtive threatening gestures and open their mouths to frame silent, hurried obscenities. The
boys laughed and retreated. They walked along the Savannah, always in the shade of large trees. At
Queen’s Park West they came on a mobile stall selling syrupy ice shavings in two colours. They
bought; they sucked; they stained hands, faces, shirts. Then the Negro boy, anxious to regain his
character, suggested that they should go to the Botanical Gardens to look for copulating couples.
They went, they looked. Deployed by the Negro boy, they surprised one couple into a hasty show of
decency. The second time they were chased by an enraged American sailor. They retreated to the
Rock Gardens, and walked past the architectural marvels of Maraval Road. They walked past the
Scottish baronial castle, the Moorish mansion, the semi-Oriental palace, the Bishop’s Spanish
Colonial residence, and came to the blue and red Italianate college, empty now, though there were
two cars below a pillared and balustraded balcony. They were proud and a little frightened. Kings
for half a day, they would soon be new boys here, and nothing. The clock struck three. They looked
up at the tower. The dial would be seen for weeks and months and years; those chimes would
become familiar. They would warn of many things; they would mark many beginnings and ends.
Now they said that the half-holiday was over. “See you next term,” the boys said, and went their
separate ways.
That evening, while Mr. Biswas and the parents of the other exhibitioners beat their way to
the teacher’s door with gifts of rum and whisky, trussed fowls and hobbled goats, the Tuttle
children were set to their books with a new rigidity, although Christmas was not far off and the
school term nearly ended. The writer, encouraged, completed the first volume of Captain Daniel’s
West Indian History . For Vidiadhar it was an unhappy evening. He was given no food. For he had
not won an exhibition, Vidiadhar who had brought home clean question papers with ticks beside the
questions he had done and a neat list of correct answers to the arithmetic sums, who had begun to
learn Latin and French, who had gone to the intercollegiate football match and uttered partisan
cries. Now, deprived of his Latin and French books, he was made to sit up late before his exhibition
notes, and was repeatedly flogged by Chinta.
The newspapers next morning carried photographs of Anand and the other exhibitioners.
There were also columns of fine print containing the names of the many hundred who had only
passed the examination. The readers and learners searched among these for Vidiadhar’s name. They
didn’t find it. Always on the winning side, the readers and learners turned over the page and
pretended to look there, and then they pretended to go through the classified advertisements, which
were in the same small type. Having no flogging powers over the readers and learners, and unable
now to threaten them with Govind, Chinta could only abuse them. She abused them individually;
she abused Shama; she abused W. C. Tuttle; she abused Anand and his sisters; she accused Mr.
Biswas of bribing the examiners; she brought up the theft of the eighty dollars. Her voice was a
grating whine; her eyes were red, her whole face inflamed. The readers and learners giggled.
Vidiadhar, enjoying the holiday granted to the school for its exhibition successes, was set to his
exhibition notes again. From time to time Chinta interrupted her abuse to scream at him. “Watch
me! Give me that knife and see if I don’t cut his little tongue.” And: “You are going to live on bread
and water from now on. That is the only thing that will satisfy some people in this house.”
Sometimes she fell silent and ran, literally ran, to the table where he sat and twisted his ears as if
she were winding up an alarm clock, until, like an alarm, Vidiadhar went off. Then she slapped him
and cuffed him, pulled his hair and pressed her fingers around his throat. Stupefied, Vidiadhar filled
page after page with meaningless notes in his crapaud-foot handwriting; and his sisters and brothers
scowled at everyone as though they were all responsible for Vidiadhar’s failure and punishment.
All day and all evening Chinta kept it up, her shrill voice part of the background noise of the
house, until even W. C. Tuttle was driven to comment, in his pure Hindi, in a voice loud enough to
penetrate the partition of Mr. Biswas’s inner room, whence the comment was reported to Mr.
Biswas in the front room, preparing the way for a reconciliation between the two men, which was
completed when W. C. Tuttle’s second eldest boy, due to write the exhibition examination next
year, came down to ask Anand to be his tutor.
And it was from the Tuttles that Anand got the only presents he had for winning the
exhibition: a copy of The Talisman from W. C. Tuttle, which he found unreadable, and a dollar
from Mrs. Tuttle, which he gave to Shama. Mr. Biswas was ashamed to mention the promise in the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare , and Anand didn’t remind him: he was content to assume that war
conditions did not permit the buying of a bicycle. There was no prize from the school either. Again
war conditions did not permit; and as “a war measure” Anand was given a certificate printed by the
Government Printery at the bottom of the street, “in lieu of” the leather-bound, gilt-edged book
stamped with the school crest.
It had been a year of scarcity, of rising prices and fights in shops for hoarded flour. But at
Christmas the pavements were crowded with overdressed shoppers from the country, the streets
choked with slow but strident traffic. The stores had only clumsy local toys of wood, but the signs
were bright as always with rosy-cheeked Santa Clauses, prancing reindeer, holly and berries and
snow-capped letters. Never were destitutes more deserving, and Mr. Biswas worked harder than
ever. But everything–shops, signs, crowds, noise, busyness–generated the urgent gaiety that
belonged to the season. The year was ending well.
And it was to end even better.
One morning early in Christmas week, when Mr. Biswas was looking through applications in
the hope of finding a destitute carpenter for Christmas Eve, a well-dressed middle-aged man whom
he did not know came straight to his desk, handed him an envelope with a stiff gesture, and, without
a word, turned and walked briskly out of the newsroom.
Mr. Biswas opened the envelope. Then he pushed back his chair and ran outside. The man
was in a car and already driving away.
“You didn’t see him?” the receptionist asked. “He did ask for you. Doctor feller.
Rameshwar.”
He had returned the letter. The error had been acknowledged.
“What about it, boy?” he said to Anand later that day. “Series of letters. To a doctor. A judge.
Businessman, editor. Brother-in-law, mother-in-law. Twelve Open Letters , by M. Biswas. What
about it?”
5. The Void
The college had no keener parent than Mr. Biswas. He delighted in all its rules, ceremonies
and customs. He loved the textbooks it prescribed, and reserved to himself the pleasure of taking
Anand’s exhibitioner’s form to Muir Marshall’s in Marine Square and bringing home a parcel of
books, free. He papered the covers and lettered the spines. On the front and back endpapers of each
book he wrote Anand’s name, form, the name of the college, and the date. Anand was put to much
trouble to conceal this from the other boys at school who wrote their own names and were free to
desecrate their books in whatever way they chose. Though it concerned neither Anand nor himself,
Mr. Biswas went to the college speech day. He insisted, too, on going to the Science Exhibition, and
spoiled it for Anand; for while the Negro boy ran to the parentless, saying, “Look, man, a snail can
screw itself,” Anand had to remain with Mr. Biswas who, dutifully beginning at the beginning,
looked long and carefully at the electrical exhibits and got no further than the microscopes. “Stand
up here,” he told Anand. “Hide me while I pull out this slide. Just going to cough and spit on it.
Then we could both have a look.” “Yes, Daddy ,” Anand said. “Of course, Daddy .” But they didn’t
see the snails. When, as an experiment, each boy was given a homework book which parents or
guardians were supposed to fill in and sign every day, Mr. Biswas filled in and signed punctiliously.
Few other parents did; and the homework books were soon abandoned, Mr. Biswas filling in and
signing to the last. He had no doubt that his interest in Anand was shared by the entire college; and
when Anand went back to classes after one of his asthmatic attacks, Mr. Biswas always asked in the
afternoon, “Well, what did they say, eh?” as though Anand’s absence had dislocated the running of
the school.
In October Myna was put on milk and prunes. She had unexpectedly been chosen to sit the
exhibition examination in November. Mr. Biswas and Anand went with her to the examination hall,
Anand condescending, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. He saw his name painted on the board
in the headmaster’s room, and was touched at this effort of the school to claim him. When Myna
came out at lunchtime she was very cheerful, but under Anand’s severe questioning she had grown
dazed and unhappy, had admitted mistakes and tried to show how other mistakes could be construed
as accurate. Then they took her to the Dairies, all three feeling that money was being wasted. When
the results came out no one congratulated Mr. Biswas, for Myna’s name was lost in the columns of
fine print, among those who had only passed.
Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which
the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old,
his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each
realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long
accepted.
But it was not so when, waking up one night, he saw that he had for some time grown to
accept his circumstances as unalterable: the buzzing house, the kitchen downstairs, the food being
brought up the front steps, the growing children and Shama and himself squeezed into two rooms.
He had grown to look upon houses–the bright drawingrooms through open doors, the chink of
cutlery from diningrooms at eight, when he was on the way to a cinema, the garages, the
hose-sprayed gardens in the afternoons, the barelegged lounging groups in verandahs on Sunday
mornings–he had grown to look upon houses as things that concerned other people, like churches,
butchers’ stalls, cricket matches and football matches. They had ceased to rouse ambition or misery.
He had lost the vision of the house.
He sank into despair as into the void which, in his imagining, had always stood for the life he
had yet to live. Night after night he sank. But there was now no quickening panic, no knot of
anguish. He discovered in himself only a great unwillingness, and that part of his mind which feared
the consequences of such a withdrawal was increasingly stilled.
Destitutes were investigated and the deserving written about. The truce with W. C. Tuttle was
broken, patched up and broken again. The readers and learners read and learned. Anand and
Vidiadhar continued not to speak, and this silence between the cousins was beginning to be known
at the college, which Vidiadhar had also managed to enter, though at a suitably low form. Govind
beat Chinta, wore his threepiece suits and drove his taxi. The widows stopped taking sewing lessons
at the Royal Victoria Institute, gave up the clothes-making scheme and all other schemes. One came
and camped, roomless, under the house, threatened to take a stall in the George Street Market, was
dissuaded, and returned to Shorthills. W. C. Tuttle acquired a gramophone record of a
fifteen-year-old American called Gloria Warren singing “You Are Always in My Heart”. And every
morning, after the readers and learners had streamed out of the house, Mr. Biswas escaped to the
Sentinel office.
Suddenly, quite suddenly, he was revivified.
It happened during Anand’s second year at the college. Because of his unrivalled experience
of destitutes Mr. Biswas had become the Sentinel’s expert on matters of social welfare. His
subsidiary duties had included interviewing the organizers of charities and eating many dinners.
One morning he found a note on his desk requesting him to interview the newly arrived head of the
Community Welfare Department. This was a government department that had not yet begun to
function. Mr. Biswas knew that it was part of the plan for postwar development, but he did not
know what the department intended to do. He sent for the file. It was not helpful. Most of it he had
written himself, and forgotten. He telephoned, arranged for an interview that morning, and went.
When, an hour later, he walked down the Red House steps into the asphalt court, he was thinking,
not of his copy, but of his letter of resignation to the Sentinel . He had been offered, and had
accepted, a job as Community Welfare Officer, at a salary fifty dollars a month higher than the one
he was getting from the Sentinel . And he still had no clear idea of the aims of the department. He
believed it was to organize village life; why and how village life was to be organized he didn’t
know.
He had been immediately attracted by Miss Logie, the head of the department. She was a tall,
energetic woman in late middle age. She was not pompous or aggressive, as he had found women in
authority inclined to be. She had the graces, and even before there was talk of the job he had found
himself attempting to please. She also had the attraction of novelty. He had known no Indian
woman of her age as alert and intelligent and inquiring. And when the matter of the job was raised
he had no hesitation. He rejected Miss Logie’s offer of time to think it over; he feared all delay.
He walked light-heartedly down St. Vincent Street back to the office. What had just happened
was unexpected in every way. He had stopped thinking of a new job. He had paid no more than a
journalist’s attention to all the talk of postwar development, since he did not see how it involved
him and his family. And now, on a Monday morning, he had walked into a new job, and his job
made him part of the new era. And it was a job with the government! He thought with pleasure of
all the jokes he had heard about civil servants, and felt the full weight of the fears that had been
with him since Mr. Burnett had left. He could have been sacked from the Sentinel at any moment;
there was nothing or no one to protect him. But in the Service no one could be sacked just like that.
There were things like Whitley Councils, he believed. The matter would have to go through all sorts
of channels–that was the delicious word–and this, he understood, was such a complicated
proceeding that few civil servants ever did get the sack. What was that story about the messenger
who had stolen and sold all a department’s typewriters? Didn’t they just say, “Put that man in a
department where there are no typewriters”?
How many letters of resignation he had mentally addressed to the Sentinel ! Yet when, letters
having passed between the Secretariat and himself, the moment came and he sat up in the
Slumberking to write to the Sentinel , he used none of the phrases and sentences he had polished
over the years. Instead, to his surprise, he found himself grateful to the paper for employing him for
so long, for giving him a start in the city, equipping him for the Service.
He felt a fool when he received the editor’s reply. In five lines he was thanked for his letter,
his services were acknowledged, regret was expressed, and he was wished luck in his new job. The
letter was typed by a secretary, whose smart lowercase initials were in the bottom left corner.
Working out his notice, he let the Destees slide, and prepared zestfully for his new job. He
borrowed books from the Central Library and from the department’s small collection. He began
with books on sociology and immediately came to grief: he could not understand their charts or
their language. He moved on to simpler paperbacked books about village reconstruction in India.
These were more amusing: they gave pictures of village drains before and after, showed how
chimneys could be built at no cost, how wells could be dug. They stimulated Mr. Biswas to such a
degree that for a few days he wondered whether he oughtn’t to practise on the little community in
his own house. A number of books laid a puzzling stress on the need for folk dances and folk
singing during the carrying out of cooperative undertakings; some gave examples of songs. Mr.
Biswas saw himself leading a singing village as they cooperatively mended roads, cooperatively put
up superhuts, cooperatively dug wells; singing, they harvested one another’s fields. The picture
didn’t convince: he knew Indian villagers too well. Govind, for instance, sang, and W. C. Tuttle
liked music; but Mr. Biswas couldn’t see himself leading them and the singing readers and learners
to re-concrete the floor under the house, to plaster the half-walls, to build another bathroom or
lavatory. He doubted whether he could even get them to sing. He read of cottage industries:
romantic words, suggesting neatly clad peasants with grave classical features sitting at spinning
wheels in cooperatively built superhuts and turning out yards and yards of cloth before going on to
the folk singing and dancing under the village tree in the evening, by the light of flambeaux. But he
knew what the villages were by night, when the rumshop emptied. He saw himself instead in a large
timbered hall, walking up and down between lines of disciplined peasants making baskets. From
cottage industries he was diverted by juvenile delinquency, which he found more appealing than
adult delinquency. He particularly liked the photographs of the hardened delinquents: stunted,
smoking, supercilious, and very attractive. He saw himself winning their confidence and then their
eternal devotion. He read books on psychology and learned some technical words for the behaviour
of Chinta when she flogged Vidiadhar.
Miss Logie, who had at first encouraged his enthusiasm, now attempted to control it. He saw
her often during the month, and their relationship grew even better. Whenever she introduced him
to anyone she spoke of him as her colleague, a graciousness he had never before experienced; and
from being relaxed with her he became debonair.
Then he had a fright.
Miss Logie said she would like to meet his family.
Readers! Learners! Govind! Chinta! The Slumberking bed and the destitute’s diningtable!
And perhaps some widow might want to try again, and there would be a little tray of oranges or
avocado pears outside the gate.
“Mumps,” he said.
It was partly true. The contagion had struck down Basdai’s readers and learners wholesale,
had attacked a little Tuttle; but it had not yet got to Mr. Biswas’s children.
“They are all down with mumps, I fear.”
And when later Miss Logie asked after the children, Mr. Biswas had to say they had
recovered, though they had in fact just succumbed.
Promptly at the end of the month the free delivery of the Sentinel stopped.
“Don’t you think a little holiday before you begin would be refreshing?” Miss Logie said.
“I was thinking of that.” The words came out easily; they were in keeping with his new
manner. And he saw himself condemned to a pay-less week among the readers and learners. “Yes, a
little holiday would be most refreshing.”
“Sans Souci would be very nice.”
Sans Souci was in the northeast of the island. Miss Logie, a newcomer, had been there; he had
not.
“Yes,” he said. “Sans Souci would be nice. Or Mayaro,” he added, trying to take an
independent line by mentioning a resort in the southeast.
“I am sure your family would enjoy it.”
“You know, I believe they would.” Family again! He waited. And it came. She still wanted to
meet them.
Poise deserted him. What could he suggest? Bringing them to the Red House one by one?
Miss Logie came to his rescue. She wondered whether they couldn’t all go to Sans Souci on
Sunday.
That at least was safer. “Of course, of course,” he said. “My wife can cook something. Where
shall we meet?”
“I’ll come and pick you up.”
He was caught.
“As a matter of fact I have taken a house in Sans Souci,” Miss Logie said. And then her plan
came out. She wanted Mr. Biswas to take his family there for a week. Transport was difficult, but
the car would come for them at the end of the week. If Mr. Biswas didn’t go, the house would be
empty, and that would be a waste.
He was overwhelmed. He had regarded his holidays simply as days on which he did not go to
work; he had never thought that he might use the time to take his family to some resort: the thing
was beyond ambition. Few people went on such holidays. There were no boarding-houses or hotels,
only beach houses, and these he had always imagined to be expensive. And now this! After all those
letters to destitutes beginning, Dear Sir , Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday…
He made objections, but Miss Logie was firm. He thought it better not to make a fuss, for he
did not wish to give the impression that he was making the thing bigger than it was. Miss Logie had
made the offer out of friendship; he would accept as a friend. He warned her, however, that he
would have to consult Shama, and Miss Logie said she understood.
But he felt that he had been found out, that he had revealed more of himself to Miss Logie
than he had thought; and this feeling was especially oppressive on the following morning when,
after his bath in the outdoor bathroom, he stood before Shama’s dressingtable in the inner room. In
moods of self-disgust he hated dressing, and this morning he saw that his comb, which he had
repeatedly insisted was his and his alone, was webbed with woman’s hair. He broke the comb,
broke another, and used language which went neither with his clothes nor with the manner he
assumed when he put them on.
He reported to Miss Logie that Shama was delighted, and self-reproach was quickly forgotten
when he and Shama began to prepare for the holiday. They were like conspirators. They had
decided on secrecy. There was no reason for this except that it was one of the rules of the house: the
Tuttles, for instance, had been unusually aloof just before the arrival of the naked torchbearer, and
Chinta had been almost mournful before Govind had gone into threepiece suits.
On Saturday Shama began packing a hamper.
The secret could no longer be kept from the children. The laden hamper, the car, the drive to
the seaside: it was something they knew too well. “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar!” Chinta called. “You
just keep your little tails here, eh, and read your books, you hear. Your father is not in any position
to take you for excursion, you hear. He not drawing money regular from the government, let me tell
you.” The readers and learners stood around Shama while she packed the hamper. Shama,
uncharacteristically stern and preoccupied, ignored them. Her manner suggested that the whole
affair–as indeed she said to Basdai, the widow, who had come to watch and offer advice–was very
troublesome, and she was going through with it simply to please the children and their father.
Their destination and length of the holiday had been disclosed. The manner of transportation
was still kept secret: it was to be the final surprise. It also caused Mr. Biswas much anxiety. All
week he had been dreading the arrival of Miss Logie in her brand-new Buick. He intended the gap
between her arrival and their departure to be as brief as possible. Under no circumstances was she to
be allowed to get out of the car. For then she might go through the gate and get a glimpse of what
went on below the house; she might even go there. Or she might go up the steps and knock on the
front door; W. C. Tuttle would come out, and heaven knows what pose he would be in that
morning: yogi, weight-lifter, pundit, lorry-driver at rest. At all costs she had to be prevented from
entering the front room and seeing the Slumberking where Mr. Biswas had lain and written his
formal acceptance of the post of Community Welfare Officer, seeing the destitute’s dining-table
still stacked with books on sociology, village reconstruction in India, cottage industries and juvenile
delinquency.
Accordingly, although Miss Logie had said she would arrive at nine, the children were fed
and dressed by eight, and set up as sentinels by the gate. From time to time they deserted their
posts; then, after agitated search, they were extricated from groups of readers and learners or
hurried out of the lavatory. Shama was finding she had forgotten all sorts of things: toothbrushes,
towels, bottle-opener. Mr. Biswas himself could not decide what book to take, and was in and out of
the front room. Eventually all was ready and they stood strung out on the front steps, waiting to
pounce. Mr. Biswas was dressed as for holiday: tieless, with Saturday’s shirt bearing the impress of
Saturday’s tie, his coat over his arm and his book in his hand. Shama was in her ornate visiting
clothes; she might have been going to a wedding.
Waiting, they were infiltrated by readers and learners. “Haul your little tail,” Mr. Biswas
whispered savagely. “Get back inside. Go and comb your hair. And you, go and put on some
shoes.” A few of the younger were cowed; the older, knowing that Mr. Biswas had no rights,
flogging or ordering, over them, were openly contemptuous and, to Mr. Biswas’s dismay, some
went out on to the pavement, where they stood like storks, jamming the sole of one foot against the
smudged and streaked pink-washed wall. The gramophone was playing an Indian film song; Govind
was whining out the Ramayana ; Chinta’s scraping voice was raised querulously; Basdai was
shrilling after some of her girls to come and help with the lunch.
Then the cries came. A green Buick had turned the corner. Mr. Biswas and his family were
down the steps with suitcases and hampers, Mr. Biswas shouting angrily now to the readers and
learners to get away.
When the car stopped, Mr. Biswas and his family were standing right on the edge of the
pavement. Miss Logie, sitting next to the chauffeur, smiled and gave a little wave, using fingers
alone. She appeared to recognize what was required of her and did not get out of the car.
Expressionlessly the chauffeur opened doors and stowed away suitcases and hampers in the boot.
W. C. Tuttle came out to the verandah, the lorry-driver at rest. His khaki shorts revealed
round sturdy legs, and his white vest showed off a broad chest and large flabby arms. Leaning over
the half-wall of the verandah, under the hanging ferns, he put a long finger delicately to one
quivering nostril and, with a brief explosive noise, emitted some snot from the other nostril.
Mr. Biswas chattered on in a daze, to divert attention from the readers and learners and W. C.
Tuttle, to drown the noises from the house, the sudden piercing cry from Chinta, as from someone
in agony: “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break
your foot.”
Shy, interested readers and learners streamed steadily through the gate.
“There’s lots of room,” Miss Logie said, smiling. “It won’t be a squeeze for long. I shan’t be
going all the way to Sans Souci. I don’t feel very well and a day at the beach would be too much for
me.”
Mr. Biswas understood. “Only these four,” he said. “Only these four.” He kicked backwards
in the direction of the readers and learners. The circle merely widened.
“Orphans,” Mr. Biswas said.
Then mercifully they were off, some of the orphans racing the Buick a little way down the
street.
They commiserated with Miss Logie on her indisposition and begged her to change her mind;
there would be no pleasure for them if she did not come. She said she hadn’t intended to go bathing
at all; she had intended to come with them only for the ride. But presently, when it was established
without doubt that there were only four children in the car and that there would be no stops for
more, her resolution weakened and she said the fresh air had revived her a little and she would
come with them after all.
When people stared from the road the children didn’t know whether to smile, frown or look
away; those who were near the straps held on to them. Never, as from the windows of that Buick,
did North Trinidad look so beautiful. They noted, as though they had never seen it before from a
bus, how the landscape changed, from marsh just outside Port of Spain, to straggling suburb, to
hilly country, to country village, to country town, to rice fields and sugarcane fields, with the
Northern Range always on their left. They drove along the smooth new American highway, were
checked on entering and leaving the American army post by soldiers with helmets and rifles. Then
they drove along a winding road overarched by cool trees to Arima, which welcomed careful
drivers; and on to Valencia, where the road ran straight for miles, with untouched bush on either
side.
They were, Anand reflected, driving with hampers–laden hampers–to the sea. The English
composition had come true.
Mr. Biswas was worried about Shama. Sitting plumply next to Miss Logie on the front seat,
her elaborate georgette veil over her hair, Shama was showing herself self-possessed and even
garrulous. She was throwing off opinions about the new constitution, federation, immigration,
India, the future of Hinduism, the education of women. Mr. Biswas listened to the flow with
surprise and acute anxiety. He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such
violent prejudices; and he suffered whenever she made a grammatical mistake.
They stopped at Balandra, and walked to the dangerous part of the bay where the waves were
five feet high and a sign warned against bathing. Never had water seemed so blue; never had sand
shone so golden; never had bay curved so beautifully, waves broken so neatly. It was a perfect
world, the curve of the coconut trees repeated in the curve of the bay, the curl of the waves, the arc
of the horizon. Already they could taste the salt on their lips. The fresh wind blew; the trousers of
Mr. Biswas and the chauffeur sausaged out; the women and girls held down their skirts.
They bathed where it was safe.
(And later Anand pointed out to Mr. Biswas that in spite of what she had said Miss Logie had
brought her bathing suit.)
They opened the hampers and ate on the dry sand in the dangerous shade of coconut trees
(“Over a million coconuts will fall on the East Coast today,” had been the hollow bright opening of
a feature he had written for the Sentinel on the copra industry).
Then they drove to Sans Souci, through narrow, ill-tended roads darkened by bush on both
sides. Small villages surprised them here and there, lost and lonely. And now the sea was always
with them. Unseen, it thundered continuously. The wind never ceased to rage through the trees;
above the swaying bush, the dancing plumes of green, the sky was high and open. From time to
time they had glimpses of the sea: so near, so unending, so alive, so impersonal. What would
happen if, by some accident, they should drive off the road into it?
In a dream that night this accident was to happen, and Kamla was to wake gratefully, yet to
find herself in a new dread, for she had forgotten the room where they had all gone to sleep, in the
large bare house at the top of the hill, impenetrably black all round, with the sea beating a little
distance away and the coconut trees groaning in the perpetual wind.
They had arrived in the late afternoon and had not had much time to explore. Miss Logie, the
chauffeur and the Buick had gone back; and finding themselves alone, in a large house, on holiday,
they had all grown shy with one another. Night brought an additional uneasiness. In the strange,
musty, blank-walled drawingroom they sat around an oil lamp, the contents of the hamper gone
stale and unappetizing, the cream cheese, bought from the Dairies the day before, already gone bad.
The house was large enough for them to have had one room each; but the noise, the loneliness, the
unknown surrounding blackness had kept them all in one room.
Wind and sea welcomed them in the morning. Light showed them where they were. The wind
and the sea raged all night, but now they were both fresh, heralds of the new day. The children
walked about the shining wet grass on the top of the hill; the sea, glimpsed through the tormented
coconut trees, lay below them; their hands and faces became sticky with salt.
Their shyness slowly wore away. They went to deserted beaches, where lay the partly buried
wrecks of strange trees brought across the sea. Beyond the wavering tidewrack the dimpled sand
was pitted with the holes of sand crabs, small, nervous creatures the colour of sand. They made
excursions to the places with French names: Blanchisseuse, Matelot; and to Toco and Salybia Bay.
They picked almonds, sucked them, crushed the seeds; in land so wild and remote it was
inconceivable that anything was owned by anyone. From trees that bordered the road they picked
bright red cashew nuts, sucked the fruit and took the nuts to the house and roasted them. The days
were long. Once they came upon a group of fishermen who were talking a French patois; once they
met a group of well-dressed, noisy Indian youths, one of whom asked Myna what Savi’s name was,
and Mr. Biswas saw that as a father he now had fresh responsibilities. In the evenings, with the
noise of sea and wind, comforting now, around them, they played cards: they had found four packs
in the house.
Another discovery, in a cupboard full of tinned food, was Cerebos Salt. They had never seen
salt in tins. The shop salt they knew was coarse and damp; this was fine and dry, and ran as easily
as the drawing on the tin showed.
They forgot the house in Port of Spain and spread themselves about the house on the hill. It
seemed there was no one in the world but themselves, nothing alive but themselves and the sea and
the wind. They had been told that on a clear day they could see Tobago; but that never happened.
And then the Buick came for them.
As they drove back to Port of Spain the new shy pleasure they had found in being alone was
forgotten. They were preparing for the two rooms, the city pavements, the badly concreted floor
under the house, the noise, the quarrels. On the way out they had feared arrival, a casting off into
the unknown; now they dreaded returning to what they knew. But they spoke of other things. Shama
spoke about the evening meal, remembered she had nothing. The car stopped at a shop in the
Eastern Main Road and they enjoyed a brief distinction as the occupants of a chauffeur-driven car.
There was no reception for them in Port of Spain. It was evening. The readers and learners
were reading and learning. Everything was as they had left it: the weak light bulbs, the long tables,
the chanting of some readers as they attempted to learn lessons by heart. Only, the house seemed
lower, darker, suffocating. At first they were ignored. But presently the questioning began, the
prying to see whether any disaster had befallen, for the sadness with which they had returned had
already made them irritable and short-tempered.
Did the wilderness really exist? Was the house still at the top of the hill? Was the wind still
making the coconut trees groan? Did the sea beat on those empty beaches? Was it at that moment of
night bringing to shore those black berries, branches and strands of seaweed from miles and
thoughtless miles away?
They fell asleep with the roar of wind and sea in their heads. In the morning they woke to the
humming house.
Mr. Biswas did not immediately superintend lines of peasants making baskets. No one sang
for him. And he encouraged no one to build better huts or to take up cottage industries. He began to
survey an area, and went from house to house filling in questionnaires prepared by Miss Logie.
Most of the people he interviewed were flattered. Some were puzzled: “Who send you?
Government? Think they really care?” Some were more than puzzled: “You mean they paying you
for this? Just to find out how we does live. But I could tell them for nothing, man.” Mr. Biswas
hinted that there was more to the survey than they thought; pressed, he had to bluff. It was like
interviewing destitutes; only there was no money for anyone except himself at the end. And he was
doing well. In addition to his salary he could claim subsistence and travel allowances; and on many
evenings he had to lay aside his books and work out his claims. He filled in a form, submitted it,
and after a few days got a voucher. He took the voucher to the Treasury and exchanged it with a
man behind a zoo-like cage for another voucher which was limp with handling and ticked,
initialled, signed and stamped in various colours. This he exchanged at another cage, this time for
real money. It took time, but these trips to the Treasury made him feel that he was at last getting at
the wealth of the colony.
He found that the extra money could be spent in any of a number of new ways, and he did not
save as much as he had hoped. Savi had to be sent to a better school; their food had to be improved;
something had to be done about Anand’s asthma. And he decided, and Shama agreed, that it was
time he got himself some new suits, to go with his new job.
Apart from the serge suit in which he had gone to funerals, he had never had a proper suit,
only cheap things of silk and linen; and he ordered his new suits with love. He discovered he was a
dandy. He fussed about the quality and tone of the cloth, the cut of the suits. He enjoyed fittings: the
baked smell of the white-tacked cloth, the tailor’s continual reverential destruction of his own work.
When the first suit was ready he decided to wear it right away. It pricked his calves unpleasantly; it
had a new smell; and when he looked down at himself the cascade of brown appeared grotesque and
alarming. But the mirror reassured him, and he felt the need to show off the suit without delay.
There was an inter-colonial cricket match at the Oval. He did not understand the game, but he knew
that there was always a crowd at these matches, that shops and schools closed for them.
It was the fashion at the time for men to appear on sporting occasions with a round tin of fifty
English cigarettes and a plain box of matches held in one hand, the forefinger pressing the
matchbox to the top of the tin. Mr. Biswas had the matches; he used half a day’s subsistence
allowance to buy the cigarettes. Not wishing to derange the hang of his jacket, he cycled to the Oval
with the tin in his hand.
As he came along Tragarete Road he heard faint scattered applause. It was just before lunch,
too early for the crowds; it would have been better after tea. Nevertheless he cycled round to the
stands side of the Oval, leaned his bicycle against the peeling corrugated iron fence, chained it,
removed the clips from his carefully folded trousers, shook down the trousers, smoothed out the
pleats, straightened the prickly jacket over his shoulders. There was no queue. He paid a dollar for
his ticket and, holding his tin of cigarettes and box of matches, walked up the stairs to the stand. It
was less than a quarter full. Most of the people were at the front. He spied an empty seat in the
middle of one of the few packed rows.
“Excuse me,” he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him,
people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and “Excuse me,” he kept
on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a
handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned
his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr.
Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the
lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause.
Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr. Biswas rose and
clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were
racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the
crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr. Biswas did not inspect the
pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his
hand.
His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a
showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two
pronged poles. But it was a beginning.
The interviews completed, it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had
gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every
classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred, and then he had to go through all the
questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and
classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums,
and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into
service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night,
squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved
unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by
half and cursed the destitute who had made it.
“This blasted thing is getting me sick,” he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get
him to go to bed. “Getting me sick, I tell you. Sick . I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my
little destitutes.”
“Everywhere you go, is the same,” Shama said.
He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen,
Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the
department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern
businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department:
a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same
objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.
This was Mr. Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such
letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually
criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had
been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole
fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr. Biswas that no one
else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama.
Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded
from various government departments and they could go back to where they came from. He could
only go back to the Sentinel and fifty dollars a month less.
He was glad he had written a mild letter of resignation. And, preparing for misfortune, he took
to dropping in at the Sentinel office. The newspaper atmosphere never failed to excite him, and the
welcome he received stilled his fears: he was regarded as one who had escaped and made good. Yet
with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to
last.
In time he completed his charts (to display the classifications clearly he joined three double
foolscap sheets and produced a scroll nearly five feet long, which made Miss Logie roar with
laughter); and he wrote his report. Charts and report were typed and duplicated and, he was told,
sent to various parts of the world. Then he was at last free to get villagers to sing or to take up
cottage industries. He was given an area. And a memorandum informed him that, to enable him to
move easily about his area, he was to be given a car, on a painless government loan.
The rule of the house was followed again. The children were sworn to secrecy. Mr. Biswas
brought home glossy booklets which had the aromatic smell of rich art paper and seemed to hold
the smell of the new car. Secretly he took driving lessons and obtained a driving licence. Then, on a
perfectly ordinary Saturday morning, he drove to the house in a brand-new Prefect, parked it
casually before the gate, not quite parallel to the pavement, and walked up the front steps, ignoring
the excitement that had broken out.
“Vidiadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break your hand and your
foot.”
When Govind arrived at lunchtime he found his parking space occupied. His Chevrolet was
larger, but old and unwashed; the mudguards had been dented, cut, welded; one door had been
ducoed in a lustreless colour that did not exactly match; there was the H–for hire–on the number
plate; and the windscreen was made ugly by various stickers and a circular plaque which carried
Govind’s photograph and taxi-driver’s permit.
“Matchbox,” Govind muttered. “Who leave this matchbox here?”
He did not impress the orphans, and he did not diminish the energy of Mr. Biswas’s children
who, ever since the car had been so carelessly parked by Mr. Biswas, had been wiping away dust
and saying crossly how a new car collected dust. They found dust everywhere: on the body, the
springs, the underside of the mudguards. They wiped and polished and discovered, with distress,
that they were leaving scratches on the paintwork, very slight, but visible from certain angles. Myna
reported this to Mr. Biswas.
He was lying on the Slumberking, surrounded by many glossy booklets. He asked, “You hear
anything? What they saying, eh?”
“Govind say it is a matchbox.”
“Matchbox, eh. English car, you know. Would last for years and still be running when his
Chevrolet is on the rubbish dump.”
He returned to studying an intricate drawing in red and black which explained the wiring of
the car. He could not fully understand it, but it was his habit whenever he bought anything new,
whether a pair of shoes or a bottle of patent medicine, to read all the literature provided.
Kamla came into the room and said that the orphans had been fingering the car and blurring
the shine.
Mr. Biswas knelt on the bed and advanced on his knees to the front window. He lifted the
curtain and, pushing a vested chest outside, shouted, “You! Boy! Leave the car alone! You think is
a taxi?”
The orphans scattered.
“I coming to break the hands of some of you,” Basdai, the guardian widow, called. News of
her advance and her pause to break a whip from the neem tree at the side of the yard was relayed by
hoots and shouts and giggles. Some orphans, disdaining to run, were flogged on the pavement.
There was crying, and Basdai said, “Well, some people satisfy now.”
Shama stayed under the house and did not go out to see the car. And when Suniti, the former
contortionist, now baby-swollen, who often stopped at the house on her way to and from Shortfalls
after quarrels and reconciliations with her husband, and attempted to shock by talk of getting a
divorce, and wore ugly and unsuitable frocks as a mark of her modernity, when Suniti came to
Shama and said, “So, Aunt, you come a big-shot now. Car and thing, man!” Shama said, “Yes, my
child,” as though the car was another of Mr. Biswas’s humiliating excesses. But she had begun to
prepare another hamper.
There was no need for Mr. Biswas to ask where they wanted to go. They all wanted to go to
Balandra, to repeat the experience of delight: the drive in the private car, the hampers, the beach.
They went to Balandra, but it was a different experience. They did not attend to the landscape.
They savoured the smell of new leather, the sweet smell of a new car. They listened to the soft,
steady beat of the engine and compared it with the grinding and pounding of the vehicles they met.
And they listened acutely for wrong noises. The grilled cover of an ashtray on one door did not sit
properly and tinkled distractingly; they attempted to stop it with a matchstick. The ignition key had
already been provided by Mr. Biswas with a chain. The chain struck the dashboard. That distracted
them too. At one moment it looked as though it might rain; a few drops flecked the windshield.
Anand promptly put the wiper on. “You’ll scratch the glass!” Mr. Biswas cried. They worried about
putting their shoes on the floormats. They consulted the dashboard clock constantly, comparing it
with those they saw on the road. They marvelled at the working of the speedometer.
“Man was telling me,” Mr. Biswas said, “that these Prefect clocks go wrong in no time.”
And they decided to call in on Ajodha.
They parked the car in the road and walked around the house to the back verandah. Tara was
in the kitchen. Ajodha was reading the Sunday Guardian . Mr. Biswas said they were going to the
beach and had just dropped in for a minute. There was a pause, and each of them wondered whether
they should tell.
Ajodha commented on the sickliness of them all, pinched Anand’s arms and laughed when the
boy winced. Then, as though to cure them at once, he made them drink glasses of fresh milk and
had the servant girl peel some oranges from the bag in the corner of the verandah.
Jagdat came in, his funeral clothes relieved by his broad, bright tie, his unbuttoned cuffs
folded back above hairy wrists. He asked jocularly, “Is your car outside, Mohun?”
The children studied their glasses of milk.
Mr. Biswas said gently, “Yes, man.”
Jagdat roared as at a good joke. “The old Mohun, man!”
“Car?” Ajodha said, puzzled, petulant. “Mohun?”
“A little Prefect,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Some of those pre-war English cars can be very good,” Ajodha said.
“This is a new one,” Mr. Biswas said. “Got it yesterday.”
“Cardboard.” Ajodha bunched his fingers. “It will mash like cardboard.”
“A drive, man, Mohun!” Jagdat said.
The children, Shama, were alarmed. They looked at Mr. Biswas, Jagdat smiling, slapping his
hands together.
Mr. Biswas was aware of their alarm.
“You are right, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “He will lick it up.”
“It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said. “Seaside.” He looked at his Cyma watch. Then, noticing that
Jagdat had stopped smiling, he added, “Running in, you know.”
“I run in more cars than you,” Jagdat said angrily. “Bigger and better.”
“He will lick it up,” Ajodha repeated.
“It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said again.
“Hear him,” Jagdat said. “But don’t give me that, eh, man. Listen. I was driving motorcars
before you even learn to drive a donkey-cart. Look at me. You think I pining to drive in your
sardine can? You think that?”
Mr. Biswas looked embarrassed.
The children didn’t mind. The car was safe.
“Mohun ! You think that?”
At Jagdat’s scream the children jumped.
“Jagdat,” Tara said.
He strode out of the verandah into the yard, cursing.
“I know what it is, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “The first time you get a car is always the same.”
He waved at his yard, the graveyard of many vehicles.
He went out with them to the road. When he saw the Prefect he hooted.
“Six horse power?” he said. “Eight?”
“Ten,” Anand said, pointing to the red disc below the bonnet.
“Yes, ten.” He turned to Shama. “Well, niece, where are you going in your new car?”
“Balandra.”
“I hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard.”
“Wind, Uncle?”
“Or you will never get there. Poof! Blow you off the road, man.”
They continued in gloom for some way.
“Wanting to drive my car,” Mr. Biswas said. “As if I would let him. I know the way he does
drive cars. Lick them up in no time at all. No respect for them. And getting vexed into the bargain, I
ask you.”
“I always say you have some low people in your family,” Shama said.
“Another man wouldn’t even ask a thing like that,” Mr. Biswas said. “I wouldn’t ask it. Feel
how the car sitting nice on the road? Feel it, Anand? Savi?”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Poof! Blow me off the road. You wouldn’t expect an old man like that to be jealous, eh? But
that is exactly what he is. Jealous.”
Yet whenever they saw another Prefect on the road they could not help noticing how small
and fussy it looked; and this was strange, for their own car enclosed them securely and did not feel
small in any way. They continued to listen for noises. Anand held the chain of the ignition key to
keep it from striking the dashboard. When they stopped at Balandra they made sure the car was
parked away from coconut trees; and they worried about the effect of the salt air on the body.
Disaster came when they were leaving. The rear wheels sank into the hot loose sand. They
watched the wheels spinning futilely, kicking up sand, and felt that the car had been irremediably
damaged. They pushed coconut branches and coconut shells and bits of driftwood under the wheels
and at last got the car out. Shama said she was convinced that the car now leaned to one side; the
whole body, she said, had been strained.
On Monday Anand cycled to school on the Royal Enfield, and the promise in the Collins
Clear-Type Shakespeare was thereby partly fulfilled. War conditions had at last permitted; in fact,
the war had been over for some time.
And during all this time W. C. Tuttle had remained quiet. He had not attempted to reply to
Mr. Biswas’s new suits, the new car, the holiday; so that it seemed that these reverses, coming one
after the other, had been too much for him. But when the glory of the Prefect began to fade, when it
was accepted that floormats became dirty, when washing the car became a chore and was delegated
by the children to Shama, when the dashboard clock stopped and no one noticed the tinkle of the
ashtray lid, W. C. Tuttle with one stroke wiped out all Mr. Biswas’s advantages, and killed the
rivalry by rising above it.
Through Basdai, the widow, he announced that he had bought a house in Woodbrook.
Mr. Biswas took the news badly. He neglected Shama’s consolations and picked quarrels with
her. “ ‘What is for you is for you’,” he mocked. “So that is your philosophy, eh? I’ll tell you what
your philosophy is. Catch him. Marry him. Throw him in a coal barrel. That is the philosophy of
your family. Catch him and throw him in a coal barrel.” He became acutely sensitive to criticism of
the Community Welfare Department. The books on social work and juvenile delinquency gathered
dust on the diningtable, and he returned to his philosophers. The Tuttles’ gramophone played with
infuriating gaiety, and he banged on the partition and shouted, “Some people still living here, you
know.”
Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be
simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave
his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles
were vacating.
But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.
“Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?” Mr.
Biswas asked Shama. “If he got this house.”
Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for
all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation to get them out.
“Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that sort of house.” He imagined one of those rotting warrens he
had visited when investigating destitutes. And now at one moment Mr. Biswas wished W. C. Tuttle
out of the house immediately and at another moment wanted him to fail in his litigation. “Throwing
those poor people out. Where they going to live, eh? But your family don’t care about things like
that.”
One morning Mr. Biswas saw W. C. Tuttle leaving the house in a suit, tie and hat. And that
afternoon Basdai reported that litigation had failed.
“I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,” Mr. Biswas said.
Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his
disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber
building that needed only a coat of paint.
Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the
City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.
“Any old trick to throw the poor people out,” Mr. Biswas said. “Though I suppose with ten fat
Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to
Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.”
“That is exactly what he is doing,” Shama said, affronted at the piracy.
“You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.” And even as he spoke he
recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.
The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs. Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed
her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner
suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was
ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as
tearful as if Mrs. Tuttle had just been married.
Mr. Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was
announced that Mrs. Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom
over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs. Tulsi’s active life was finished, that
only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be
endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs.
Tulsi would do to them.
She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became
quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs. Tulsi’s presence brought them an
unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared
floggings.
Mrs. Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her
head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had
a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a
day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s
Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead.
Sushila was kept on the go all day. At Hanuman House Sushila had sought to gain power by being
Mrs. Tulsi’s nurse; now that the organization of the house had been broken up, the position carried
no power, but Sushila was bound to it, and she had no children to rescue her.
Time hung heavily on Mrs. Tulsi’s hands. She did not read. The radio offended her. She was
never well enough to go out. She moved from her room to the lavatory to the front verandah to her
room. Her only solace was talk. Daughters were always at hand, but talk with them seemed only to
enrage her; and as her body decayed so her command of invective and obscenity developed. Her
rages fell oftenest on Sushila, whom she ordered out of the house once a week. She cried out that
her daughters were all waiting for her to die, that they were sucking her blood; she pronounced
curses on them and their children, and threatened to expel them from the family.
“I have no luck with my family,” she told Miss Blackie. “I have no luck with my race.”
And it was Miss Blackie who received her confidences, Miss Blackie who reported and
comforted. And there was the Jewish refugee doctor. He came once a week and listened. The house
was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that
remained of her softness and humour. When he left, she said to Miss Blackie, “Never trust your
race, Black. Never trust them.” And Miss Blackie said, “No”m.” Gifts of fruit were sent regularly to
the doctor and sometimes Mrs. Tulsi would suddenly order Basdai and Sushila to prepare an
elaborate meal and take it to the doctor’s house, treating the matter as one of urgency, as though she
was satisfying some craving of her own.
Still her daughters came to the house. They knew they all had some small hold on her: they
knew that she feared loneliness and never wished to push them beyond her reach; they knew they
could hurt her by staying away. If Miss Blackie reported that one daughter had been particularly
upset, then Mrs. Tulsi made overtures, and made promises. In such moods she might give a piece of
jewellery, she might take off a ring or a bracelet and give it. So the daughters came, and none was
willing to let Mrs. Tulsi be alone with any other. The visits of Mrs. Tuttle were especially
distrusted. She bore abuse with unexampled patience and was able at the end to suggest that Mrs.
Tulsi should look at plants, because green nourished the eyes and soothed the nerves.
Though she abused her daughters, she took care not to offend her sons-in-law. She greeted
Mr. Biswas briefly but politely. And she never attempted to remonstrate with Govind, who
continued to behave as before. He beat Chinta when the mood took him, and, ignoring pleas for
silence for Mrs. Tulsi’s headaches, sang from the Ramayana . It was left to the sisters to comment
on Govind’s behaviour.
There were times when she wished to have children about her. Then she summoned the
readers and learners to scrub the floor of the drawingroom and verandah, or she made them sing
Hindi hymns. Her mood changed without warning, and the readers and learners were perpetually
apprehensive, never knowing whether they were required to be solemn or amusing. Sometimes she
stood them in lines in her room and made them recite arithmetic tables, flogging the inaccurate with
as much vigour as her arms would allow, flabby, muscleless arms, broad and loose towards the
armpit, and swinging like dead flesh. Miss Blackie burst into squelchy laughter when a child made a
stupid mistake or when Mrs. Tulsi made a witticism; and Mrs. Tulsi, her eyes masked by dark
glasses, would give a pleased, crooked smile. In sterner moments Miss Blackie grew stern as well
and moved her jaws up and down quickly, saying “Mm!” at every blow Mrs. Tulsi gave.
Another trial for the readers and learners was Mrs. Tulsi’s concern for their health. Every five
Saturdays or so she called them to her room and dosed them with Epsom salts; and between these
gloomy, wasted week-ends she listened for coughs and sneezes. There was no escaping her. She had
learned to recognize every voice, every laugh, every footstep, every cough and almost every sneeze.
She took a special interest in Anand’s wheeze and doglike cough. She bought him some poisonous
herb cigarettes; when these had no effect she prescribed brandy and water and gave him a bottle of
brandy. Anand, while hating the brandy and water, drank it for its literary associations: he had read
of the mixture in Dickens.
Sometimes she sent for old friends from Arwacas. They came and camped for a week or so,
and listened to Mrs. Tulsi. She, refreshed, talked all day and late into the night, while the friends,
lying on bedding on the floor, made drowsy mechanical affirmations: “Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother.”
Some visits were cut short by illness, some by carefully documented dreams of bad omen; those
visitors who stayed to the end went away fatigued, doped, bleary-eyed.
Regularly too, she had pujas , austere rites aimed at God alone, without the feasting and
gaiety of the Hanuman House ceremonies. The pundit came and Mrs. Tulsi sat before him; he read
from the scriptures, took his money, changed in the bathroom and left. More and more prayer flags
went up in the yard, the white and red pennants fluttering until they were ragged, the bamboo poles
going yellow, brown, grey. For every puja Mrs. Tulsi tried a different pundit, since no pundit could
please her as well as Hari. And, no pundit pleasing her, her faith yielded. She sent Sushila to burn
candles in the Roman Catholic church; she put a crucifix in her room; and she had Pundit Tulsi’s
grave cleaned for All Saints’ Day.
The more she was recommended not to exert herself the less she was able to exert herself,
until she appeared to live only for her illness. She became obsessed with the decay of her body, and
finally wanted the girls to search her head for lice. No louse could have survived the hourly dousing
with bay rum which her head received, but she was enraged when the girls found nothing. She
called them liars, pinched them, pulled their hair. Sometimes she was only hurt; then she shuffled
out to the verandah and sat, taking her veil to her lips, feeding her eyes on the green, as Mrs. Tuttle
had recommended. She would speak to no one, refuse to eat, reject all care. She would sit, feeding
her eyes on the green, the tears running down her slack cheeks below her dark glasses.
Of all hands she liked Myna’s best. She wanted Myna to search her head for lice, wanted
Myna to kill them, wanted to hear them being squashed between Myna’s fingernails. This
preference created some jealousy, upset Myna, annoyed Mr. Biswas.
“Don’t go and pick her damn lice,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Don’t worry with your father,” Shama said, unwilling to lose this unexpected hold over Mrs.
Tulsi.
And Myna went and spent hours in Mrs. Tulsi’s room, her slender fingers exploring every
strand of Mrs. Tulsi’s thin, grey, bay-rum-scented hair. From time to time, to satisfy Mrs. Tulsi,
Myna clicked her fingernails, and Mrs. Tulsi swallowed and said, “Ah,” pleased that one of her lice
had been caught.
An additional constraint came upon the house when Shekhar and his family paid one of their
visits to Mrs. Tulsi. If Shekhar had come alone he would have been more warmly welcomed by his
sisters. But the antagonism between them and Shekhar’s Presbyterian wife Dorothy had deepened
as Shekhar had prospered and Dorothy’s Presbyterianism had become more assertive and
excluding. There had almost been an open quarrel when Shekhar, approached by the widows for a
loan to start a mobile restaurant, had offered them jobs in his cinemas instead. They regarded this as
an insult and saw in it the hand of Dorothy. Of course they refused: they did not care to be
employed by Dorothy and they would never work in a place of public entertainment.
Shekhar could never appear as more than a visitor. He came in his car, led his wife and five
elegant daughters upstairs, and for a long time nothing was heard except occasional footsteps and
Mrs. Tulsi’s low voice going evenly on. Then Shekhar came downstairs by himself, forbiddingly
correct in white short sleeved sports shirt and white slacks. Having listened to his mother, he now
listened to his sisters, staring them in the eye and saying, “Hm–hm,” his top lip hanging over his
lower lip and almost concealing it. He spoke little, as though unwilling to disturb the set of his
mouth. His words came out abruptly, his expression never changed, and everything he said seemed
to have an edge. When he tried to be friendly with the readers and learners he only frightened them.
Yet he never appeared unkind; only preoccupied.
After lunch, prepared by Basdai and Sushila and eaten upstairs, Dorothy and her daughters
passed downstairs, Dorothy booming out her greetings, her daughters remaining close together and
speaking in fine, almost inaudible voices. Then Dorothy would look at her watch and say,
“Caramba ! Ya son las tres. D nde est tu Padre? Lena, va a llamarle. Vamos, vamos. Es
demasiado tarde . Well, all right, people,” she would say, turning to the outraged sisters and the
wondering readers and learners, “we got to go.” Since they had taken to spending holidays in
Venezuela and Colombia, Dorothy used Spanish when she spoke to her children or to Shekhar in
the presence of her sisters-in-law. Later the sisters agreed that Shekhar was to be pitied; they had all
noted his unhappiness.
Before they left, Shekhar and Dorothy always called on Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas did not relish
these calls. It wasn’t only that Shekhar’s party was campaigning against the Community Welfare
Department. Shekhar had never forgotten that Mr. Biswas was a clown, and whenever they met he
tried to provoke an act of clowning. He made a belittling remark, and Mr. Biswas was expected to
extend this remark wittily and fancifully. To Mr. Biswas’s fury, Dorothy had also adopted this
attitude; and from this relationship there was no escape, since anger and retaliation were counted
parts of the game. Shekhar came into the front room and asked in his brusque, humourless manner,
“Is the welfare officer still well-fed?” Then he hoisted himself on to the destitute’s diningtable and
threatened Mr. Biswas with the destruction of the department and joblessness. For a time Mr.
Biswas responded in his old way. He told stories about civil servants, spoke of the trouble he had
making up his expense sheets, the work he had looking for work. But soon he made his annoyance
plain. “You take these things too personally,” Shekhar said, still playing the game. “Our differences
are only political. You’ve got to be a little more sophisticated, man.”
“Be a little more sophisticated,” Mr. Biswas said, when Shekhar left. “On a hungry belly? The
old scorpion. Wouldn’t care a damn if I lose my job tomorrow.”
For some time there had been rumours. And now at last the news was given out: Owad, Mrs.
Tulsi’s younger son, was returning from England. Everyone was excited. Sisters came up from
Shorthills in their best clothes to talk over the news. Owad was the adventurer of the family.
Absence had turned him into a legend, and his glory was undiminished by the numbers of students
who were leaving the colony every week to study medicine in England, America, Canada and India.
His exact attainments were not known, but were felt by all to be extraordinary and almost beyond
comprehension. He was a doctor, a professional man, with letters after his name! And he belonged
to them! They could no longer claim Shekhar. But every sister had a story which proved how close
she had been to Owad, what regard he had had for her.
Mr. Biswas felt as proprietary as the sisters towards Owad and shared their excitement. But he
was uneasy. Once, many years before, he had felt that he had to leave Hanuman House before
Owad and Mrs. Tulsi returned to it. Now he experienced the same unease: the same sense of threat,
the same need to leave before it was too late. Over and over he checked the money he had saved,
the money he was going to save. His additions appeared on cigarette packets, in the margins of
newspapers, on the backs of buff government folders. The sum never varied: he had six hundred
and twenty dollars; by the end of the year he would have seven hundred. It was a staggering sum,
more than he had ever possessed all at once. But it couldn’t attract a loan to buy any house other
than one of those wooden tenements that awaited condemnation. At two thousand dollars or so they
were bargains, but only for speculators who could take the tenants to court, rebuild, or wait for the
site to rise in value. Now, his anxiety growing with the excitement about him, Mr. Biswas scanned
agents’ lists every morning and drove about the city looking for places to rent. When for one whole
week the City Council bought pages and pages in the newspapers to serialize the list of houses it
was putting up for auction because their rates had not been paid, Mr. Biswas turned up at the Town
Hall with all the city’s estate agents; but he lacked the confidence to bid.
He could not avoid Mrs. Tulsi when he returned to the house. She sat in the verandah, feeding
her eyes on the green, patting her lips with her veil.
And though he had nerved himself for the blow, he grew frantic when it came.
It was Shama who brought the message.
“The old bitch can’t throw me out like that,” Mr. Biswas said. “I still have some rights. She
has got to provide me with alternative accommodation.” And: “Die, you bitch!” he hissed towards
the verandah. “Die!”
“Man!”
“Die! Sending poor little Myna to pick her lice. That did you any good? Eh? Think she would
throw out the little god like that? O no. The god must have a room to himself. You and me and my
children can sleep in sugarsacks. The Tulsi sleeping-bag. Patents applied for. Die, you old bitch!”
They heard Mrs. Tulsi mumbling placidly to Sushila.
“I have my rights,” Mr. Biswas said. “This is not like the old days. You can’t just stick a piece
of paper on my door and throw me out. Alternative accommodation, if you please.”
But Mrs. Tulsi had provided alternative accommodation: a room in one of the tenements
whose rents Shama had collected years before. The wooden walls were unpainted, grey-black,
rotting; at every step on the patched, shaky floor wood dust excavated by woodlice showered down;
there was no ceiling and the naked galvanized roof was fluffy with soot; there was no electricity.
Where would the furniture go? Where would they sleep, cook, wash? Where would the children
study?
He vowed never to talk to Mrs. Tulsi again; and she, as though sensing his resolve, did not
speak to him. Morning after morning he went from house to house, looking for rooms to rent, until
he was exhausted, and exhaustion burned out his anger. Then in the afternoons he drove to his area,
where he stayed until evening.
Returning late one night to the house, which seemed to him more and more ordered and
sheltering, he saw Mrs. Tulsi sitting in the verandah in the dark. She was humming a hymn, softly,
as though she were alone, removed from the world. He did not greet her, and was passing into his
room when she spoke.
“Mohun?” Her voice was groping, amiable.
He stopped.
“Mohun?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“How is Anand? I haven’t heard his cough these last few days.”
“He’s all right.”
“Children, children. Trouble, trouble. But do you remember how Owad used to work? Eating
and reading. Helping in the store and reading. Checking money and reading. Helping head and head
with everybody else, and still reading. You remember Hanuman House, Mohun?”
He recognized her mood, and did not wish to be seduced by it. “It was a big house. Bigger
than the place we are going to.”
She was unruffled. “Did they show you Owad’s letter?”
Those of Owad’s letters which went the rounds were mainly about English flowers and the
English weather. They were semi-literary, and were in a large handwriting with big spaces between
the words and big gaps between the lines. “The February fogs have at last gone,” Owad used to
write, “depositing a thick coating of black on every window-sill. The snowdrops have come and
gone, but the daffodils will be here soon. I planted six daffodils in my tiny front garden. Five have
grown. The sixth appears to be a failure. My only hope is that they will not turn out to be blind, as
they were last year.”
“He never took much interest in flowers when he was a boy,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
“I suppose he was too busy reading.”
“He always liked you, Mohun. I suppose that was because you were a big reader yourself. I
don’t know. Perhaps I should have married all my daughters to big readers. Owad always said that.
But Seth, you know–” She stopped; it was the first time he had heard her speak the name for years.
“The old ways have become oldfashioned so quickly, Mohun. I hear that you are looking for a
house.”
“I have my eye on something.”
“I am sorry about the inconvenience. But we have to get the house ready for Owad. It isn’t his
father’s house, Mohun. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could come back to his father’s house?”
“Very nice.”
“You wouldn’t like the smell of paint. And it’s dangerous too. We are putting up some
awnings and louvres here and there. Modern things.”
“It sounds very nice.”
“Really for Owad. Though I suppose it would be nice for you to come back to.”
“Come back to?”
“Aren’t you coming back?”
“But yes,” he said, and couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. “Yes, of course. Louvres
would be very nice.”
Shama was elated at the news.
“I never did believe,” she said, “that Ma did want us to stay away for good.” She spoke of
Mrs. Tulsi’s regard for Myna, her gift of brandy to Anand.
“God!” Mr. Biswas said, suddenly offended. “So you’ve got the reward for lice-picking?
You’re sending back Myna to pick some more, eh? God! God! Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse!”
It sickened him that he had fallen into Mrs. Tulsi’s trap and shown himself grateful to her. She
was keeping him, like her daughters, within her reach. And he was in her power, as he had been
ever since he had gone to the Tulsi Store and seen Shama behind the counter.
“Cat and mouse!”
At any moment she might change her mind. Even if she didn’t, to what would they be allowed
to come back? Two rooms, one room, or only a camping place below the house? She had shown
how she could use her power; and now she had to be courted and pacified. When she was nostalgic
he had to share her nostalgia; when she was abusive he had to forget.
To escape, he had only six hundred dollars. He belonged to the Community Welfare
Department: he was an unestablished civil servant. Should the department be destroyed, so would
he.
“Trap!” he accused Shama. “Trap!”
He sought quarrels with her and the children.
“Sell the damn car!” he shouted. And knowing how this humiliated Shama, he said it
downstairs, where it was heard by sisters and the readers and learners.
He became surly, constantly in pain. He threw things in his room. He pulled down the pictures
he had framed and broke them. He threw a glass of milk at Anand and cut him above the eye. He
slapped Shama downstairs. So that to the house he became, like Govind, an object of contempt and
ridicule. Beside him, the Community Welfare Officer, the absent Owad shone with virtue, success
and the regard of everyone.
They moved the glass cabinet, Shama’s dressingtable, Theophile’s bookcase, the hatrack and
the Slumberking to the tenement. The iron fourposter was dismantled and taken downstairs with the
destitute’s diningtable and the rocking-chair, whose rockers splintered on the rough, uneven
concrete. Life became nightmarish, divided between the tenement room and the area below the
house. Shama continued to cook below the house. Sometimes the children slept there with the
readers and learners; sometimes they slept with Mr. Biswas in the tenement.
And every afternoon Mr. Biswas drove to his area to spread knowledge of the finer things in
life. He distributed booklets; he lectured; he formed organizations and became involved in the
complicated politics of small villages; and late at night he drove back to Port of Spain, to the
tenement which was far worse than any of the houses he had visited during the day. The Prefect
became coated with dust which rain had hardened and dappled; the floormats were dirty; the back
seat was dusty and covered with folders and old, brown newspapers.
His duties then took him to Arwacas, where he was organizing a “leadership” course. And, to
avoid the long late drive to Port of Spain, to avoid the tenement and his family, he decided to spend
the time at Hanuman House. The back house had been vacant for some time, and no one lived there
except a widow who, pursuing an undisclosed business scheme, had stolen back from Shorthills,
trusting to her insignificance to escape Seth’s notice. There was little need for her to worry. For
some time after the death of his wife Seth had acted wildly. He had been charged with wounding
and using insulting behaviour, and had lost much local support. His skills appeared to have left him
as well. He had tried to insuranburn one of his old lorries and had been caught and charged with
conspiracy. He had been acquitted but it had cost much money; and he had thereafter grown
quiescent. He looked after his dingy foodshop, sent no threats, and no longer spoke of buying over
Hanuman House. The family quarrel, never bursting into incident, had become history; neither Seth
nor the Tulsis were as important in Arwacas as they had been.
In the store the Tulsi name had been replaced by the Scottish name of a Port of Spain firm,
and this name had been spoken for so long that it now fully belonged and no one was aware of any
incongruity. A large red advertisement for Bata shoes hung below the statue of Hanuman, and the
store was bright and busy. But at the back the house was dead. The courtyard was littered with
packing cases, straw, large sheets of stiff brown paper, and cheap untreated kitchen furniture. In the
wooden house the doorway between the kitchen and hall had been boarded over and the hall used as
a storeroom for paddy, which sent its musty smell and warm tickling dust everywhere. The loft at
one side was as dark and jumbled as before. The tank was still in the yard but there were no fish in
it; the black paint was blistered and flaked, and the brackish rainwater, with iridescent streaks as of
oil on its surface, jumped with mosquito larvae. The almond tree was still sparse-leaved, as though
it had been stripped by a storm in the night; the ground below was dry and fibrous. In the garden the
Queen of Flowers had become a tree; the oleander had grown until its virtue had been exhausted
and it was flower-less; the zinnias and marigolds were lost in bush. All day the Sindhis who had
taken over the shop next door played mournful Indian film songs on their gramophone; and their
food had strange smells. Yet there were times when the wooden house appeared to be awaiting
reanimation: when, in the still hot afternoons, from yards away came the thoughtful cackling of
fowls, the sounds of dull activity; when in the evenings oil lamps were lit, and conversation was
heard, and laughter, a dog being called, a child being flogged. But Hanuman House was silent. No
one stayed when the store closed; and the Sindhis next door slept early.
The widow occupied the Book Room. This large room had always been bare. Stripped of its
stacks of printed sheets, surrounded by emptiness, the muted sounds of life from neighbouring
houses, the paddy rising high in the hall downstairs, it seemed more desolate than ever. A cot was in
one corner; religious and comforting pictures hung low on the walls about it; next to it was a small
chest in which the widow kept her belongings.
The widow, pursuing her business, visiting, was seldom in. Mr. Biswas welcomed the silence,
the stillness. He requisitioned a desk and swivel-chair from government stores (strange, such proofs
of power), and turned the long room into an office. In this room, where the lotuses still bloomed on
the wall, he had lived with Shama. Through the Demerara window he had tried to spit on Owad and
flung the plateful of food on him. In this room he had been beaten by Govind, had kicked Bell’s
Standard Elocutionist and given it the dent on the cover. Here, claimed by no one, he had reflected
on the unreality of his life, and had wished to make a mark on the wall as proof of his existence.
Now he needed no such proof. Relationships had been created where none existed; he stood at their
centre. In that very unreality had lain freedom. Now he was encumbered, and it was at Hanuman
House that he tried to forget the encumbrance: the children, the scattered furniture, the dark
tenement room, and Shama, as helpless as he was and now, what he had longed for, dependent on
him.
On the baize-covered desk in the long room there were glasses and spoons stained white with
Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, sheafs and sheafs of paper connected with his duties as
Community Welfare Officer, and the long, half-used pad in which he noted his expenses for the
Prefect, parked in the grounds of the court house.
The redecoration of the house in Port of Spain proceeded slowly. Frightened by the price,
Mrs. Tulsi had not handed over the job to a contractor. Instead, she employed individual workmen,
whom she regularly abused and dismissed. She had no experience of city workpeople and could not
understand why they were unwilling to work for food and a little pocketmoney. Miss Blackie
blamed the Americans and said that rapaciousness was one of her people’s faults. Even after wages
had been agreed Mrs. Tulsi was never willing to pay fully. Once, after he had worked for a
fortnight, a burly mason, insulted by the two women, left the house in tears, threatening to go to the
police. “My people, mum,” Miss Blackie said apologetically.
It was nearly three months before the work was done. The house was painted upstairs and
downstairs, inside and out. Striped awnings hung over the windows; and glass louvres, looking
fragile and out of place in that clumsy, heavy house, darkened the verandahs.
And Mr. Biswas’s nightmare came to an end. He was invited to return from the tenement. He
did not return to his two rooms but, as he had feared, to one, at the back. The rooms he had
surrendered were reserved for Owad. Govind and Chinta moved into Basdai’s room, and Basdai,
able now only to board, moved under the house with her readers and learners. In his one room Mr.
Biswas fitted his two beds, Theophile’s bookcase and Shama’s dressingtable. The destitute’s
diningtable remained downstairs. There was no room for Shama’s glass cabinet, but Mrs. Tulsi
offered to lodge it in her diningroom. It was safe there and made a pleasing, modern show.
Sometimes the children slept in the room; sometimes they slept downstairs. Nothing was fixed. Yet
after the tenement the new arrangement seemed ordered and was a relief.
And now Mr. Biswas began to make fresh calculations, working out over and over the number
of years that separated each of his children from adulthood. Savi was indeed a grown person.
Concentrating on Anand, he had not observed her with attention. And she herself had grown
reserved and grave; she no longer quarrelled with her cousins, though she could still be sharp; and
she never cried. Anand was more than halfway through college. Soon, Mr. Biswas thought, his
responsibilities would be over. The older would look after the younger. Somehow, as Mrs. Tulsi
had said in the hall of Hanuman House when Savi was born, they would survive: they couldn’t be
killed. Then he thought: “I have missed their childhoods.”
6. The Revolution
A letter from London. A postcard from Vigo. Mrs. Tulsi ceased to be ill and irritable, and
spent most of her day in the front verandah, waiting. The house began to fill with sisters, their
children and grandchildren, and shook with squeals and thumps. A huge tent was put up in the yard.
The bamboo poles were fringed with coconut branches which curved to form arches, and a cluster
of fruit hung from every arch. Cooking went on late into the night, and singing; and everyone slept
where he could find a place. It was like an old Hanuman House festival. There had been nothing
like it since Owad had gone away.
A cable from Barbados threw the house into a frenzy. Mrs. Tulsi became gay. “Your heart,
mum,” Miss Blackie said. But Mrs. Tulsi couldn’t sit still. She insisted on being taken downstairs;
she inspected, she joked; she went upstairs and came downstairs again; she went a dozen times to
the rooms reserved for Owad. And in the confusion a messenger was sent to summon the pundit
even after the pundit had come, a self-effacing man who, in trousers and shirt, had passed unnoticed
in the growing crowd.
The sisters announced their intention of staying awake all that night. There was so much
cooking to do, they said. The children fell asleep. The group of men around the pundit thinned; the
pundit fell asleep. The sisters cooked and joyously complained of overwork; they sang sad wedding
songs; they made pots of coffee; they played cards. Some sisters disappeared for an hour or so, but
none admitted she had gone to sleep, and Chinta boasted that she could stay awake for seventy-two
hours, boasting as though Govind was still the devoted son of the family, as though his brutalities
had not occurred, as though time had not passed and they were still sisters in the hall of Hanuman
House.
They grew lethargic just before dawn, but the morning light kindled them into fresh,
over-energetic activity. Children were washed and fed and dressed before the street awoke; the
house was swept and cleaned. Mrs. Tulsi was bathed and dressed by Sushila; on her smooth skin
there were small beads of perspiration, although the sun had not yet come out and she seldom
perspired. Presently the visitors started arriving, many of them only tenuously related to the house,
and not a few–the relations, say, of a grandchild’s in-laws–unknown. The street was choked with
cars and bright with the dresses of women and girls. Shekhar and Dorothy and their five daughters
came. Everyone fussed about something: children, food, wharf-passes, transport. Continually cars
drove off with an important noise. Their drivers, returning, showed passes and told of encounters
with startled harbour officials.
For Mr. Biswas it had been a difficult night. And the morning began badly. When he asked
Anand to bring him the Guardian Anand reported that the paper had been appropriated by the
pundit and had disappeared. Then he was turned out of the room while Shama and the girls dressed.
Downstairs was chaos. He took one look at the bathroom and decided not to use it that day. When
he went back to the room it was filled with the slight but offensive smell of face powder and there
were clothes everywhere. Miserably, he dressed. “The wreck of the blasted Hesperus,” he said,
using a comb to clean his brush of woman’s hair, sniffing as the dust rose visibly in the sunlight that
slanted in below the striped awning. Shama noted his irritability but did not comment upon it; this
enraged him further. The house, upstairs and down, resounded with impatient footsteps, shouts and
shrieks.
The cavalcade left the house in sections. Mrs. Tulsi travelled in Shekhar’s car. Mr. Biswas
went in his Prefect; but his family had split up and gone in other cars, and he was obliged to take
some people he didn’t know.
The liner, white and reposed, lay at anchor in the gulf. A chair was found for Mrs. Tulsi and
set against the dull magenta wall of the customs shed. She was dressed in white, her veil pulled over
her forehead. She pressed her lips together from time to time and crumpled a handkerchief in one
hand. She was flanked by Miss Blackie, in her churchgoing clothes and a straw hat with a red
ribbon, and by Sushila, who carried a large bag with an assortment of medicines.
A tug hooted. The liner was being towed in. Some of the children, those who had learnt at
school that one proof of the roundness of the earth was the way ships disappeared beyond the
horizon, exaggerated the distance between ship and wharf. Many said the ship would come
alongside in two to three hours. Shivadhar, Chinta’s younger son, said it wouldn’t do so until the
evening of the following day.
But the adults were concerned with something else.
“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters whispered.
Seth was on the wharf. He stood two customs sheds away. He was in a cheap suit of an
atrocious brown, and to anyone who remembered him in his khaki uniform and heavy bluchers he
looked like a labourer in his Sunday suit.
Mr. Biswas glanced at Shekhar. He and Dorothy were staring resolutely at the approaching
ship.
Seth was uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He took out his long cigarette holder from his breast
pocket and, concentrating, fixed a cigarette into it. With that suit, and with such uncertain gestures,
the cigarette holder was an absurd affectation, and appeared so to the children who could not
remember him. As soon as he had lighted the cigarette a khaki-uniformed official pounced and
pointed to the large white notices in English and French on the customs sheds. Seth ejected the
cigarette and crushed it with the sole of an unshining brown shoe. He replaced the holder in his
breast pocket and clasped his hands behind his back.
Soon, too soon for some of the children, the ship was alongside. The tugs hooted, retrieved
their ropes. Ropes were flung from ship to wharf, which now, in the shadow of the white hull, was
sheltered and almost roomlike.
Then they saw him. He was wearing a suit they had never known, and he had a Robert Taylor
moustache. His jacket was open, his hands in his trouser pockets. His shoulders had broadened and
he had grown altogether bigger. His face was fuller, almost fat, with enormous round cheeks; if he
wasn’t tall he would have looked gross.
“Is the cold in England,” someone said, explaining the cheeks.
Mrs. Tulsi, Miss Blackie, the sisters, Shekhar, Dorothy and every granddaughter who had
borne a child began to cry silently.
A young white woman joined Owad behind the rails. They laughed and talked.
“Ar bap !” one of Mrs. Tulsi’s woman friends cried out through her tears.
But it was only a passing alarm.
The gangway was laid down. The children went to the edge of the quay and examined the
mooring ropes and tried to look through the lighted portholes. Someone started a discussion about
anchors.
And then he was down. His eyes were wet.
Mrs. Tulsi, sitting on her chair, all her effervescence gone, lifted her face to him as he stooped
to kiss her. Then she held him round the legs. Sushila, in tears, opened her bag and held a bright
blue bottle of smelling-salts at the ready. Miss Blackie wept with Mrs. Tulsi, and every time Mrs.
Tulsi sniffed, Miss Blackie said, “Hm-mm. Hm. Mm.” Children, ungreeted, stared. The brothers
shook hands, like men, and smiled at one another. Then it was the turn of the sisters. They were
kissed; they burst into new tears and feverishly attempted to introduce those of their children who
had been born in the intervening years. Owad, kissing, crying, went through them quickly. Then it
was the turn of the eight surviving husbands. Govind, who had known Owad well, was not there,
but W. C. Tuttle, who had scarcely known him, was. Long brahminical hairs sprouted out of his
ears, and he drew further attention to himself by closing his eyes, neatly shaking away tears, putting
a hand on Owad’s head and speaking a Hindi benediction. As his turn came nearer Mr. Biswas felt
himself weakening, and when he offered his hand he was ready to weep. But Owad, though taking
the hand, suddenly grew distant.
Seth was advancing towards Owad. He was smiling, tears in his eyes, raising his hands as he
approached.
In that moment it was clear that despite his age, despite Shekhar, Owad was the new head of
the family. Everyone looked at him. If he gave the sign, there was to be a reconciliation.
“Son, son,” Seth said in Hindi.
The sound of his voice, which they had not heard for years, thrilled them all.
Owad still held Mr. Biswas’s hand.
Mr. Biswas noted Seth’s cheap, flapping brown jacket, the stained cigarette holder. Seth held
out his hands and nearly touched Owad.
Owad turned and said in English, “I think I’d better go and see about the baggage.” He
released Mr. Biswas’s hand and walked briskly away, his jacket swinging.
Seth stood still. The tears suddenly stopped. But the smile remained.
The Tulsi crowd became agitated, drowning their relief in noise.
He could have turned away before, Mr. Biswas kept on thinking. He could have turned away
before.
Seth’s hands dropped slowly. The smile died. One hand went up to the cigarette holder and he
held his head to one side as though he was going to say something. But he only jiggled the cigarette
holder, turned and walked firmly away between two customs sheds towards the main gates.
Owad came back to the group.
“With mother? With brother? With father? Or with all of all-you?” someone asked, and Mr.
Biswas recognized the sardonic voice of the Sentinel photographer.
The photographer nodded and smiled at Mr. Biswas, as though he had found Mr. Biswas out.
“By himself,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Just by himself.”
Owad threw back his shoulders and laughed. His teeth showed; his moustache widened; his
cheeks, shining and perfectly round, rose and rested against his nose.
“Thank you,” the photographer said.
A young reporter, whom Mr. Biswas didn’t know, came up with a notebook and pencil, and
from the way he handled these implements Mr. Biswas could tell that he was inexperienced, as
inexperienced as he himself had been when he interviewed the English novelist and tried to get him
to say sensational things about Port of Spain.
Many emotions came to him and, saying good-bye to no one, he left the crowd and got into
the Prefect, oven-hot with the windows closed, and drove to his area.
“Tulips and daffodils!” he muttered, remembering Owad’s horticultural letters as he drove
along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, past the swamplands, the crumbling huts, the rice fields.
It was just after ten when he got back to Port of Spain. The house was silent and upstairs was
in darkness: Owad had gone to bed. But downstairs and in the tent lights blazed. Only the younger
children were asleep; for everyone else, including those of the morning’s visitors who had decided
to stay the night, the excitement of the day still lingered. Some were eating, some were playing
cards; many were talking in whispers; and a surprising number were reading newspapers. Anand
and Savi and Myna ran to Mr. Biswas as soon as they saw him and breathlessly began telling of
Owad’s adventures in England: his firefighting during the war, the rescues he had conducted, his
narrow escapes; the operations he had been called in to perform at the last minute on famous men,
the jobs that had been offered to him as a result, the seat in parliament; the distinguished men he
had known and sometimes defeated in public debate: Russell, Joad, Radhakrishnan, Laski, Menon:
these had already become household names. The whole house had fallen under Owad’s spell, and
everywhere in the tent little groups were going over Owad’s tales. Chinta had already worked up a
great antipathy for Krishna Menon, whom Owad particularly disliked. And in one afternoon the
family reverence for India had been shattered: Owad disliked all Indians from India. They were a
disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly and lecherous; they pronounced English in a
peculiar way; they were slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity; they
were unreliable with money; in England they went around with nurses and other women of the
lower classes and were frequently involved in scandals; they cooked Indian food badly (the only
true Indian meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself); their Hindi was
strange (Owad had repeatedly caught them out in solecisms); their ritual was debased; the moment
they got to England they ate meat and drank to prove their modernity (a brahmin boy had offered
Owad curried com beef for lunch); and, incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Indians.
The sisters said they had never really been fooled by Indians from India; they spoke of the
behaviour of the missionaries, merchants, doctors and politicians they had known; and they grew
grave as they realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture.
The pundit, in dhoti, vest, sacred thread, caste-marks and wrist-watch, reclined on a blanket
spread on the swept and flattened earth. He was reading a paper Mr. Biswas had never seen before.
And Mr. Biswas saw then that the many other newspapers in the tent were similar to the pundit’s. It
was the Soviet Weekly .
It was past midnight before Mr. Biswas, moving from group to group, decided he had heard
enough; and when Anand tried to tell of Owad’s meeting with Molotov, of the achievements of the
Red Army and the glories of Russia, Mr. Biswas said it was time for them to go to sleep. He went
up to his room, leaving Anand and Savi in the festival atmosphere downstairs. His head rang with
the great names the children and the sisters had spoken so casually. To think that the man who had
met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where Owad had been, was surely where
life was to be found.
For a full week the festival continued. Visitors left; fresh ones arrived. Perfect strangers–the
ice-man, the salted-peanuts-man, the postman, the beggars, the street-sweepers, many stray
children–were called in and fed. The food was supplied by Mrs. Tulsi and there was communal
cooking, as in the old days, which seemed to have returned with Owad. The fruit hanging from the
coconut-frond arches in the tent disappeared; the fronds became yellow. But Owad was still
followed by admiring eyes, it was still an honour to be spoken to by him, and everything he had
said was to be repeated. At any time and to anyone Owad might start on a new tale; then a crowd
instantly collected. Regularly in the evening there were gatherings in the drawingroom or, when
Owad was tired, in his bedroom. Mr. Biswas attended as often as he could. Mrs. Tulsi, forgetting
her own illnesses and anxious instead to nurse, held Owad’s hand or head while he spoke.
He had canvassed for the Labour Party in 1945 and was considered by Kingsley Martin to be
one of the architects of the Labour victory. In fact Kingsley Martin had pressed him to join the New
Statesman and Nation ; but he, laughing as at a private joke, said he had told Kingsley no. He had
earned the bitter hatred of the Conservative Party by his scathing denunciations of Winston
Churchill’s Fulton speech. Scathing was one of his favourite words, and the person he had handled
most scathingly was Krishna Menon. He didn’t say, but it appeared from his talk that he had been
gratuitously insulted by Menon at a public meeting. He had collected funds for Maurice Thorez and
had discussed Party strategy in France with him. He spoke familiarly of Russian generals and their
battles. He pronounced Russian names impressively.
“Those Russian names are ugly like hell,” Mr. Biswas ventured one evening.
The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas, then looked at Owad.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Owad said. “Biswas is a funny name, if you say it in a
certain way.”
The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas.
“Rokossovsky and Coca-cola-kowsky,” Mr. Biswas said, a little annoyed. “Ugly like hell.”
“Ugly? Vyacheslav Molotov. Does that sound ugly to you, Ma?”
“No, son.”
“Joseph Dugashvili,” Owad said.
“That’s the one I had in mind,” Mr. Biswas said. “Don’t say you think that pretty.”
Owad replied scathingly, “I think so.”
The sisters smiled.
“Gawgle,” Owad said, raising his chin (he was lying in bed) and making a strangulated noise.
Mrs. Tulsi passed her hand from his chin to his Adam’s apple.
“What was that?” Mr. Biswas asked.
“Gogol,” Owad said. “The world’s greatest comic writer.”
“It sounded like a gargle.” Mr. Biswas waited for the applause, but Shama only looked
warningly at him.
“You couldn’t say that in Russia,” Chinta said.
This led Owad from the beauty of Russian names to Russia itself. “There is work for everyone
and everyone must work. It is distinctly written in the Soviet Constitution–Basdai, pass me that
little book there–that he who does not work shall not eat.”
“That is fair,” Chinta said, taking the copy of the Soviet Constitution from Owad, opening it,
looking at the title page, closing it, passing it on. “Is exactly the sort of law we want in Trinidad.”
“He who does not work shall not eat,” Mrs. Tulsi repeated slowly.
“I just wish they could send some of my people to Russia,” Miss Blackie said, sucking her
teeth, shaking her skirt and shifting in her chair to express the despair to which her people reduced
her.
Mr. Biswas said, “How can he, who does not eat, work?”
Owad paid no attention. “In Russia, you know, Ma”–it was his habit to address many of his
sentences to her–“they grow cotton of different colours. Red and blue and green and white cotton.”
“Just growing like that?” Shama asked, making up for Mr. Biswas’s irreverence.
“Just growing like that. And you,” Owad said, speaking to a widow who had been trying
without success to grow an acre of rice at Shorthills, “you know the labour it is to plant rice.
Bending down, up to your knees in muddy water, sun blazing, day in, day out.”
“The backache,” the widow said, arching her back and putting her hand where she ached.
“You don’t have to tell me. Just planting that one acre, and I feel like going to hospital.”
“None of that in Russia,” Owad said. “No backache and bending down. In Russia, you know
how they plant rice?”
They shook their heads.
“Shoot it from an aeroplane. Not shooting bullets. Shooting rice.”
“From an aeroplane?” the rice-planting widow said.
“From an aeroplane. You could plant your field in a few seconds.”
“Take care you don’t miss,” Mr. Biswas said.
“And you,” Owad said to Sushila. “You should really be a doctor. Your bent is that way.”
“I’ve been telling her so,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
Sushila, who had had enough of nursing Mrs. Tulsi, hated the smell of medicines and asked
for nothing more than a quiet dry goods shop to support her old age, nevertheless agreed.
“In Russia you would be a doctor. Free.”
“Doctor like you?” Sushila asked.
“Just like me. No difference between the sexes. None of this nonsense about educating the
boys and throwing the girls aside.”
Chinta said, “Vidiadhar always keep on telling me that he want to be a aeronautical engineer.”
This was a lie. Vidiadhar didn’t even know the meaning of the words. He just liked their
sound.
“He would be an aeronautical engineer,” Owad said.
“To take out the rice grains from the aeroplane gas-tank,” Mr. Biswas said. “But what about
me?”
“You, Mohun Biswas. Welfare Officer. After they have broken people’s lives, deprived them
of opportunity, sending you around like a scavenger to pick the pieces up. A typical capitalist trick,
Ma.”
“Yes, son.”
“M-m-m-m.” It was Miss Blackie, purring.
“Using you like a tool. You have given us five hundred dollars profit. Here, we give you five
dollars charity.”
The sisters nodded.
O God, Mr. Biswas thought, another scorpion trying to do me out of a job.
“But you are not really a capitalist lackey,” Owad said.
“Not really,” Mr. Biswas said.
“You are not really a bureaucrat. You are a journalist, a writer, a man of letters.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Yes, man.”
“In Russia, they see you are a journalist and a writer, they give you a house, give you food
and money and tell you, ‘Go ahead and write.’ “
“Really really?” Mr. Biswas said. “A house, just like that?”
“Writers get them all the time. A dacha, a house in the country.”
“Why,” asked Mrs. Tulsi, “don’t we all go to Russia?”
“Ah,” Owad said. “They fought for it. You should hear what they did to the Czar.”
“M-m-m-m.” Miss Blackie said, and the sisters nodded gravely.
“You,” Mr. Biswas said, now full of respect, “are you a member of the Communist Party?”
Owad only smiled.
And his reaction was equally cryptic when Anand asked how, as a communist working for the
revolution, he could take a job in the government medical service. “The Russians have a proverb,”
Owad said. “A tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean.”
By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution.
The Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Weekly were read more thoroughly than the Sentinel or the
Guardian . Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in
a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to
despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.
And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not
only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he
had strong opinions about artists and writers.
“Eliot,” he told Anand. “Used to see him a lot. American, you know. The Waste Land . The
Song of J . Alfred Prufrock . Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.”
And at school Anand said, “Eliot is a man I simply loathe”; and added, “I know someone who
knows him.”
While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters
and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties
at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he
had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs. Tulsi himself. She
improved spectacularly. “These doctors stopped learning twenty years ago,” Owad said. “They
don’t even bother to keep up with the journals.” Journals had been coming to him by almost every
post from England, and drug samples, which he displayed proudly, though sometimes with scathing
comments.
Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters
often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended
to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as
yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another
doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive
treatment.
And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and
learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now
Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and
manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of
peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong
tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together.
Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another
before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying “Good shot!” and “Bad luck!” at
the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than
competent and never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house
champion.
“I can’t tell you,” Chinta said to Owad, “how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat
so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or
playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on
trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.”
“Nothing to worry about there,” Owad said, the doctor now. “That is quite normal.”
“You take a weight off my mind,” Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse
sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. “He does sweat so much.”
Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came to the house, and these visits gave
the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their
contempt for Dorothy plain. “I am sorry,” Chinta said to her one Sunday. “I cannot understand you.
I only speak Spanish.” Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that
they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad,
taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour
and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy
came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and
had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the
sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical
skills. “She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,” he said. “I hope she doesn’t
want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to
eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!”
And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went
south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and
the readers and learners hidden, the sisters continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every
meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts
never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.
The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They came to the house,
waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb
Mrs. Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his
confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was
unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the
teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about
Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over,
every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept
awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the
warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In
the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly
towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.
The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking.
Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the
brothers and Mrs. Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done
when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs. Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad
there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked
below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference
between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct
reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again.
They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest expressions and vied with
one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family
bond for the day.
It was the custom on these Sunday mornings, after the discussions and before lunch, which
came before the trip to the sea, for the men to play bridge.
And on this morning Shekhar, despite Anand’s pleas for sophistication, showed his disrelish
of Owad’s talk about the extermination of capitalists and what the Russians had done to the Czar,
and tried to turn the conversation. It turned, oddly, to modern art.
“I can’t make head or tail of this Picasso,” Shekhar said.
“Picasso is a man I loathe,” Owad said.
“But isn’t he a comrade?” Anand said.
Owad frowned. “And as for Chagall and Rouault and Braque–”
“What do you think of Matisse?” Shekhar asked, using a name he had got from Life and
putting a stop to the flow of names he didn’t know.
“He’s all right,” Owad said. “Delicious colour.”
This was unfamiliar language to Shekhar. He said, “That was a nice picture they made. Didn’t
do too well, though. The Moon and Sixpence . With George Sanders.”
Owad, concentrating on his cards, didn’t reply.
“These artists are funny fellers,” Shekhar said.
They were playing for matches. Anand scattered his heap and said, “Portrait by Picasso.”
Everyone laughed, except Owad.
“Is a long time now I want to read the book,” Shekhar said. “Isn’t it by Somerset
Morgue-hum?”
Anand scattered his matches again.
Owad said, “Why don’t you look in the mirror if you want to see a portrait by Picasso?”
This was clearly one of Owad’s scathing comments. Shekhar smiled and grunted. The
watching sisters and their children roared with laughter. Owad acknowledged their approval by
smiling at his cards.
Anand felt betrayed. He had adopted all of Owad’s political and artistic views; he had
announced himself as a communist at school, he had stated that Eliot was a man he loathed. It was
his turn to deal. In his confusion he dealt to himself first. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, looking down and
trying to inject a laugh into his voice.
“There is no need to apologize for that,” Owad said sternly. “It is simply a sign of your
conceited selfishness and egocentricity.”
The watchers held their breath.
Joviality fled from the table, Shekhar studied his cards. Owad frowned at his. His foot was
tapping on the concrete floor. More watchers came.
Anand felt his ears burning. He looked hard at his cards, feeling the silence that had spread to
all parts of the house. He was aware of watchers coming, Savi, Myna, Kamla. He was aware of
Shama.
Owad breathed heavily and swallowed noisily.
When Shekhar bid his voice was low, as though he wished to take no part in the struggle.
Vidiadhar, Shekhar’s partner, bid in a voice choked by saliva; but there was no mistaking the voice
of the free, unoffending man.
Anand bid stupidly.
Owad pressed his teeth far below his lower lip, shook his head slowly, tapped his feet, and
breathed more loudly. When he bid, his voice, full of anger now, suggested that he was trying to
redeem a hopeless situation.
The game dragged on. Anand played worse and worse. Shekhar, as though doing it against his
will, gathered in trick after trick.
Owad’s breathing and swallowing made Anand feel choked. His back was cold: his shirt was
wet with perspiration.
At last the game was over. Neatly, deliberately, Shekhar noted the score. They waited for
Owad to speak. Shuffling the cards, though it was not his turn, breathing heavily, he said, “That’s
what we get from your genius.”
The tears rushed to Anand’s eyes. He jumped up, throwing his chair backwards, and shouted,
“I didn’t tell you I was any blasted genius.”
Slap ! His right cheek burned; then trembled, even after Owad’s hand was removed, as though
the cheek had had to wait before registering the blow. And Owad was standing and Shekhar was
bending down, picking up the cards from the dusty floor. And slap ! his left cheek burned and
trembled heavily. He forgot the watchers, concentrating only on the breathing before, the rising of
the white-shirted chest. Owad’s chair was overthrown. And Shekhar, leaning awkwardly on the
table, his chair pushed back, was looking at the cards as he let them fall from one palm to another,
his brow furrowed, his top lip swelling over the lower.
The table was jerked aside. Anand found himself standing ridiculously upright, half blinded
by the shaming tears. Owad was striding energetically to the front steps. And then Anand had time
to take in the thrill, the satisfaction of the watchers, the silence of the house, with Govind’s singing
in the background, the noise of some children in the street, the roll of a car from the main road.
Shekhar still sat at the table, playing with the cards.
A mumble came from the watchers.
“You!” Anand turned to them. “What the hell are you standing up there for? Puss-puss,
puss-puss all the blasted night, talk-talk-talk.”
The effect was unexpected and humiliating. They laughed. Even Shekhar lifted his head and
gave his grunting laugh, shaking his shoulders.
Shama’s gravity made her almost absurd.
The watchers broke up. Everyone went back to his task. A lightness that was like gaiety
spread through the house.
Shekhar stacked the cards neatly on the table, rose, put his hands on Anand’s shoulders,
sighed, and went upstairs.
They heard Owad moving about from room to room.
Anand found Mr. Biswas lying in vest and pants on the bed, his back to the door, papers on
his drawn-up knees. He said without turning, “You, boy? Here, see if you can work out these
blasted travelling expenses right.” He passed the pad. “What’s the matter, boy?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“All right, just work those figures out. Everybody else making a fortune out of their cars. I
sure I losing.”
“Pa.”
“Just a minute, boy. Ought oughts are ought. Two fives are ten. Put down ought. Carry one.”
Mr. Biswas was relaxed, and even clowning: he knew that his method of multiplying always
amused.
“Pa. We must move.”
Mr. Biswas turned.
“We must move. I can’t bear to live here another day.”
Mr. Biswas heard the distress in Anand’s voice. But he was unwilling to explore it. “Move?
All in good time. All in good time. Just waiting for the revolution and my dacha.”
These happy moods of his father were getting rare. And Anand said nothing more.
He did the complicated sums for the travelling expenses. Presently he heard the dry, crisp
sounds of the ping-pong ball, the exclamations of Owad and Vidiadhar and Shekhar and the others.
He did not go down to have the lunch to which he had looked forward; and when Shama
brought it up he could not eat or drink. Mr. Biswas, his clowning mood persisting, squatted on the
chair and pretended to spit on his food, to save it from Anand’s gluttony. He knew this trick
infuriated Anand. But Anand did not respond.
Downstairs the men were getting ready to go to the sea. Sons asked their mothers for towels,
mothers urged their sons to be careful.
“Not going with them?”
Anand didn’t reply.
Mr. Biswas had withdrawn from these excursions. They were far too energetic, and the
example of Owad led to dangerous competitive feats. Instead, after lunch he went for a walk by
himself, looking at houses, occasionally making inquiries, but mostly simply looking.
The brightness of their aunts and cousins, their new and excluding chumminess, drove Savi
and Kamla and Myna to join Anand in their room, where they lay on the bed, for want of places to
sit, and made disjointed, selfconscious conversation.
Anand sipped his orange juice. The ice had melted, the juice gone flat and warm. The girls
went for a walk to the Botanical Gardens. Shama had her bath: Anand heard her singing in the
open-air bathroom and washing clothes. When she came up her hair was wet and straight, her
fingers pinched, but for all her songs her anxiety had not gone.
She said in Hindi, “Go and apologize to your uncle.”
“No!” It was the first word he had spoken for a long time.
She petted him. “For my sake.”
“The revolution,” he said.
“You wouldn’t lose anything. He is older than you. And your uncle.”
“Not my uncle. Shooting rice from aeroplanes!”
Shama began to sing softly. She flung her hair down over her face and beat it with a stretched
towel. The noises were like muffled sneezes.
The girls came back from their walk. They were brighter and talked more easily.
Then they were silent.
The men had returned. They heard their loud talk, their footsteps; Owad’s voice raised in
friendliness, breaking into laughter; the light inquiries from aunts; Shekhar’s goodbyes, his car
driving off.
Savi asked Shama in a whisper, “What happened?”
“Nothing has happened,” Shama said coaxingly, not replying to Savi, but repeating her plea to
Anand. “He will just go and apologize to your uncle, and that is all. Nothing at all.”
The girls did not want to desert Anand, and they feared going downstairs.
“Remember,” Shama said. “Not a word to your father. You know what he is like.”
She left the room. They heard her talking normally, even jestingly, with one of the aunts, and
they admired her for her courage. Then the girls also went down, to face the righteousness of the
unpersecuted.
The shower upstairs was going. Owad was in the bathroom, singing a song from an old Indian
film. This was part of his virtue: it showed how untainted he had been by England and flattered
everyone. For the virtue with which everyone had endowed him in his absence was now found in
the smallest things: Anand remembered one sister saying that Owad had brought back from England
the shoes and shirts and underclothes he had taken from Trinidad.
“Same shoes after eight years,” Anand muttered. “Blasted liar.”
The bathroom went silent.
Shama came to the room. “Quick. Before they go to the theatre.”
Anand knew the Sunday routine: the bridge, the ping-pong, lunch, the sea, the shower, dinner,
then the evening show.
The cousins could be heard assembling in the diningroom. Owad’s voice, smothered by a
towel, came from his bedroom.
Anand walked down the back stairs and up the stairs to the back verandah, the same verandah
to which he had returned after he had nearly been drowned at Docksite. From the verandah he had a
glimpse of the diningroom, where he had pulled the chair from under his father in the presence of
Owad.
The cousins saw him. Some aunts saw him. The talk stopped. Faces were turned down,
though the aunts continued to look solemn and offended and judicial. Then the talk broke out again.
The cousins were playing with cards, idly, waiting for dinner. Vidiadhar, the sweater, was smiling
down at the table, licking his lips.
Anand had to wait in the verandah for some time before Owad came out from the bedroom.
He came out with his usual heavy brisk steps. As soon as he saw Anand he became stern. And there
was silence.
Anand went in, held his hands behind his back.
“I apologize,” Anand said.
Owad continued to look stern.
At last he said, “All right.”
Anand didn’t know what to do. He remained where he was, so that it seemed he was waiting
for an invitation to dinner and the theatre. But there was no word. He turned and walked slowly out
of the room to the back verandah. As he went down the steps he heard the talk break out, heard the
conscientious bustling of the aunts in the kitchen.
Shama was waiting for him in their room. He knew that her pain was as great as his, possibly
greater, and he did not wish to increase it. She waited for him to do or say something, so that she
could apply the soothing words. But he said nothing.
“You will eat something now?”
He shook his head. How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the
shadow of the strong!
She went downstairs.
When Owad and the cousins left she came back. He was willing to eat then.
Shortly after, Mr. Biswas returned from his walk. His mood had changed. His face was
twisted with pain and Anand had to mix him some stomach powder. He was tired after his walk and
wanted to go to bed. He could sleep early on Sundays; on other evenings he came back late from his
area.
The light from the diningroom came through the tall ventilation gaps at the top of the
partition. He called Shama and told her, “Go and get them to take off that light.”
It was an awkward request at the best of times, though before Owad’s return Shama had
sometimes made it successfully. Now she could do nothing.
Mr. Biswas lost his temper. He ordered Shama and Anand to get sheets of cardboard, and with
these he tried to block the gaps at the top of the partition, jumping from the bed to the ledge on the
partition. Of the three sections he put up two fell down almost at once.
“Uncle Podger,” Savi said.
He was about to lose his temper with her as well; but, as if in answer to the commotion, the
light in the diningroom went out. He lay down on the bed in the dark and was soon asleep, grinding
his teeth, and making strange contented smacking sounds with his mouth.
Anand sat in the darkness. Shama came to the room and got into the fourposter. Anand did not
want to go downstairs. He lay on the bed beside his father and remained quite still.
He was disturbed by chatter and heavy footsteps, and made wide awake by the light coming in
through the two open sections above the partition. Some aunts who had been waiting up below the
house were now heard moving about the kitchen. The chatter continued, and laughter.
Mr. Biswas stirred and groaned. “Good God!”
Anand felt Shama awake and anxious. Listened to in this way, the chatter was as unbearable
as the dripping of a water-tap.
“God !” Mr. Biswas cried.
There was a moment’s silence in the diningroom.
“Other people in this house,” Mr. Biswas shouted.
The visiting sisters and the readers and learners could be heard awakening downstairs.
Softly, as though speaking only to the people with him, Owad said, “Don’t we all know it, old
man.” There were giggles.
The giggles maddened Mr. Biswas. “Go to France!” he cried.
“And you can go to hell.” It was Mrs. Tulsi. Her words, evenly spaced, were cold and firm
and clear.
“Ma!” Owad said.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know what to say. Surprise was followed by shock, shock by anger.
Shama got up from the fourposter and said, “Man, man.”
“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi said, almost conversationally. Her voice was followed by a
groan, a creaking of a bed-spring and a shuffling on the floor.
Lights went on downstairs, lit up the yard and reflected through the jalousied door into Mr.
Biswas’s room.
“Go to hell?” Mr. Biswas said. “Go to hell? To prepare the way for you? Praying to God, eh?
Cleaning up the old man’s grave.”
“For God’s sake, Biswas,” Owad called, “hold your damned tongue.”
“You don’t talk to me about God. Red and blue cotton! Shooting rice from aeroplanes!”
The girls came into the room.
Savi said, “Pa, stop being stupid. For God’s sake, stop it.”
Anand was standing between the two beds. The room was like a cage.
“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi sobbed. “Let him get out.”
“Neighbour! Neighbour!” a woman cried shrilly from next door. “Anything wrong,
neighbour?”
“I can’t stand this,” Owad shouted. “I can’t stand it. I don’t know what I’ve come back to.”
His footsteps were heard pounding across the drawingroom. He mumbled loudly, angrily,
indistinctly.
“Son, son,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
They heard him going down the steps, heard the gate click and shiver.
Mrs. Tulsi began to wail.
“Neighbour! Neighbour!”
A wonderful sentence formed in Mr. Biswas’s mind, and he said, “Communism, like charity,
should begin at home.”
Mr. Biswas’s door was pushed open, fresh light and shadows confused the patterns on the
walls, and Govind came into the room, his trousers unbelted, his shirt unbuttoned.
“Mohun!”
His voice was kind. Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed to tears. “Communism, like charity,” he
said to Govind, “should begin at home.”
“We know, we know,” Govind said.
Sushila was comforting Mrs. Tulsi. Her wail broke up into sobs.
“I am giving you notice,” Mr. Biswas shouted. “I curse the day I step into your house.”
“Man, man.”
“You curse the day,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Coming to us with no more clothes than you could
hang on a nail.”
This wounded Mr. Biswas. He could not reply at once. “I am giving you notice,” he repeated
at last.
“I am giving you notice,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
“I gave it to you first.”
There was an abrupt silence. Then in the drawingroom there was an outburst of low, amused
chatter, and downstairs the readers and learners, who had kept silent all along, were whispering.
“Cha!” the woman next door said. “Bother with people business.”
Govind patted Mr. Biswas on the shoulder, gave a little laugh and left the room.
The whispers downstairs subsided. The light which came through the jalousies from the yard
and striped the room was extinguished. The laughter in the drawingroom died away. Throats were
cleared with faint satiric intonations, and there were muted apprehensive chuckles. There were
shuffles on the floor, and whispers. Then the light went out and the room was in darkness and the
house was absolutely silent.
They remained appalled in the room, not daring to move, to break the silence, unable in the
dark and the stillness to believe fully in what had just happened.
Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.
Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.
They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one
another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling,
the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs.
Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that
morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr. Biswas’s children was to get away at
once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.
Mr. Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his
behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he
heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears;
and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out
of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.
The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though
Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened them all,
every sister was sure of her own hold on Ow